Carers to suffer in health board cuts

HEALTH board staff cuts will leave some families reliant on respite care without any home help later this month.

Some families who had been looking forward to a break of a week or two from their caring duties later this month only learned this week that the service will not be available to them.

The restrictions on respite care are the result of staff cuts demanded by the South Western Area Health Board.

Hospitals have been told to stop employing agency nurses immediately and to cut 155 jobs in key services, including nursing, social work and therapy.

The health board is responsible for delivering services previously provided by the Eastern Health Board to all of Co Kildare. It also delivers services to Dublin inner city south of the River Liffey, south Co Dublin and west Co Wicklow.

The board said yesterday it was reducing respite care by eight beds in Cherry Orchard Hospital in Dublin in line with staffing now available and that each respite case was now being assessed individually.

Where special circumstances arose, consideration would be given to providing alternative respite care, it said. The Irish Nurses' Organisation said the decision to cut staffing levels was in breach of the Sustaining Progress agreement and they would be raising the matter at tomorrow's (Thurs) meeting of the National Joint Council the primary forum for the management of industrial relations in the health services. The board said it was legally obliged to organise its "activity" in line with available funding and to adjust that activity where necessary to reach a sustainable level.

It explained that it was reducing its expenditure on agency nursing so as to keep within current resources.

The board wrote to employers this week informing them that it was 155 posts above the employment ceiling of 4,297 imposed last year by the Eastern Regional Health Authority with a December 2003 deadline.

INO industrial relations officer Colette Mullins said that the union would be resisting the cutbacks that were bound to cause untold hardship across the community.

"We want this decision, presented as a fait accompli, to be rescinded," she insisted.

Ms Mullins said the cutbacks would affect the most vulnerable and the most marginalised in the community.

Ms Mullins said as well as creating great hardship for the families involved it would also put their members, already working under very difficult conditions, under more pressure.

"The withdrawal of agency staff means there will be no cover for nurses out sick or on maternity or annual leave," she said