AROUND 2,000 nursing posts in the Irish health service will have been lost by the end of the year, and this has resulted in a seriously increased risk to hospital patients, the president of the Irish Association of Directors of Nursing and Midwifery has claimed.
In a paper delivered at the association’s annual general meeting in Dublin yesterday, Irene O’Connor said the Government had to rethink its position on the employment moratorium. The paper was delivered on her behalf by the association’s vice president Aveline Casey, as Ms O’Connor was delayed in New York due to flight restrictions.
If a rethink did not happen, she said, “services will be quite literally ungovernable”. “Nursing and midwifery frontline posts are vital to the services. Without nursing management posts, wards and services throughout the country are being left without adequate numbers of clinicians to lead and manage the services.
“Following an increase in patient deaths, UK Mid-Staffordshire investigation reports in 2009 and again this year highlighted the growing “acting” phenomenon within nursing governance, along with the non-replacement of nurses, as the main contributory factor in the extraordinary ration of patient deaths in the hospital.
“Is this what our Government is waiting to happen? As an association, we can no longer accept this situation, and we are obliged to bring the potentially very serious implications of the moratorium to the public’s attention.
“Nursing will have lost over 2,000 posts from the public-funded services by the end of this year; this equates to a 5 per cent loss of posts.”
Ms O’Connor said nursing and midwifery were the only frontline clinical posts that were affected by the moratorium.
“Nursing and midwifery are not only losing out disproportionately through the rapidly deteriorating staff/patient population ratio, but are being penalised to enable other posts to be developed.”
Meanwhile, at the Psychiatric Nurse Association (PNA) conference in Carlow yesterday, general secretary Des Kavanagh said the public sector should not be afraid of rejecting the public services pay and reform deal. He could find no good reason why public servants should accept the Croke Park agreement, he said.
“I am strongly of the view that for nurses to sign up for these proposals is akin to volunteering for conscription to a HSE army in which we surrender all of our rights and agree to obey our managers without protest, no matter how badly the service deteriorates,” he told the association’s annual conference in Carlow yesterday.
He criticised the proposed agreement, labelling it “absolutely blunt and indiscriminate”.
While he said that rejection of the deal would be “unprecedented” he added that, by accepting it, members would be endorsing “all of the worst cuts the HSE is trying to impose”.
He added that a requirement that unions would not take industrial action until 2014 was a “gagging clause” that sought to ensure obedience and compliance.