The nursing crisis in Dublin hospitals can only be eased if nurses are paid an on-call allowance, the matron of the National Maternity Hospital has said.
Ms Maeve Dwyer said the hospital had had to cancel all non-urgent surgery for two months because of a shortage of midwives. Elective surgery would resume at the end of October "if I can find a very large number of midwives in eight weeks".
There was no threat to the quality of service to women in labour or to people with life-threatening conditions, she said. But the cancellation of non-urgent surgery was a terrible thing to do to women who had gone to enormous trouble to prepare for operations, she said.
The hospital needed more than 30 midwives. It could not recruit Filipina nurses as general hospitals were doing because in the Philippines doctors delivered babies, she said. Midwifery was a postgraduate specialisation.
Ms Dwyer conducts "exit interviews" with everyone who leaves and has found that of the midwives who have left Holles Street recently a large number are going into public health nursing. "They will be paid more money and they won't have to work unsocial hours," she said.
Others are going down the country to be near their families, to buy their first house or to trade up to a better house. Others are taking careers breaks because they have children. A smaller number are leaving to go into pharmacy or computers or to set up their own businesses.
There were plenty of midwives in the country, she said, but many were not working in Dublin or were no longer in nursing.
A key part of the answer to the problem would be for the Dublin hospitals to be funded to pay an on-call allowance "which would exist for as long as the crisis exists".
Matrons of Dublin hospitals have been putting this view to the Department of Health and Children but have got nowhere because of a fear that similar allowances would be sought by teachers and other professionals. "But there's no shortage of teachers," she said. She also suggested that the Eastern Regional Health Authority arrange a bus service to bring nurses to and from the Dublin hospitals when shifts started and ended.
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