INO Conference: Hospital managers and senior nurses in charge of wards were slow to delegate responsibility to overseas nurses and this was affecting the confidence of the foreign nurses, many of whom were very experienced, a conference heard yesterday.
Mr Fidel Taguinood, from the Philippines and a delegate of the overseas nurses branch of the INO, said major Irish teaching hospitals were once again about to embark on a round of overseas recruitment in his country, in South Africa and India.
However, overseas nurses when they got here were being denied the chance to develop leadership skills, Mr Taguinood told the INO annual conference in Killarney.
Representatives of the 5,000 or so overseas nurses currently working here had told him responsibility was regularly being assigned to less experienced Irish colleagues when, for instance, ward managers went off duty for a number of hours.
"This leads to feelings of being undervalued," he said.
It was high time to examine the early stereotype of overseas nurses as here simply to fill a gap, and a quick fix solution for a short term - overseas nurses were here to stay, he said.
A clinical nurse manager in the Mater Hospital in Dublin, where around 45 per cent of nurses are from overseas, Mr Taguinood said he was not speaking about his own particular hospital.
Now a permanent employee, Mr Taguinood was in the Mater Hospital four years and had seven years' experience before coming to Ireland.
Being assigned responsibility for a short number of hours did not bring more money "but it gives us more confidence" and it was important for overseas nurses.
The overseas section of the INO was set up last July and for the first time it gave these nurses a chance to air their grievances.
Last year he was a guest and he was the only non-national nurse at the conference, this year there were seven, Mr Taguinood said.
The reason overseas nurses were discriminated against arose from "ignorance on the part of management" he suspected. Recruitment from overseas was suddenly thrust upon Irish managers and they had not been prepared for the phenomenon.
Mr Arnold Arcaina, also from the Philippines, a permanent staff member at St Joseph's hospital in Ennis and now the secretary of the INO in Clare, said developing leadership was part of a nurse's training in his country.
A competency-based curriculum was a long-established part of a nurse's training in his country where there were 100 schools of nursing.
In Ireland a competency-based curriculum was only in place for two years.
However, in Ireland there was hesitancy in assigning positions of responsibility, partly because Irish nurse managers tended to be suspicious of overseas training practices.
Generally, the experience for foreign nurses in Irish hospitals was improving as Irish nurse managers became more accustomed to them - in most private homes overseas nurses were not members of the unions and the experience there was harder to quantify.
Ms Gail Griffin, St Columcille's hospital, speaking in support of the overseas section, said overseas nurses were treated very badly by their managers and they felt undervalued and insecure.
However, one speaker from the floor said in Cavan General Hospital overseas nurses on two-year-contracts fared better than some Irish nurses who were being offered only six-month contracts.
The overseas nurses' motion that in the absence of ward managers of a given ward or unit, positions of responsibility should be based on experience and should be regardless of ethnicity was passed by a large majority.
A small number of delegates voted against.
INO general secretary Mr Liam Doran backed an executive council motion calling on An Bord Altranais to explain the guidelines it used to examine complaints against nurses.