Overtime bill for nurses to top 36m
Over 3 million euro was paid out by the country’s 10 health boards to nurses across all grades in the first month of 2002. Figures supplied by the Health Service Employers Agency (HSEA) show that nurses worked a total of 4,521 hours overtime each day during the month of January.
This equates with 31,650 hours per week or 812 full-time nurses.
Irish Nurses Organisation general secretary Liam Doran said overtime bills would continue to escalate because benchmarking had failed to address difficulties in attracting nurses and keeping them in the system.
“Even though the benchmarking body explicitly states that endemic overtime is unhealthy for the individual and for the service, it has totally failed to address recruitment and retention policies. Nursing is now dependent on endemic overtime and in trying to recruit from abroad and the HSEA figures confirm that.”
Of 5,508 nurses recruited by the health services in the year ending January 31, 2002, 3,128 either resigned, retired or moved to another employer. The net increase in the system was 2,380, of whom 1,817 were recruited abroad. Mr Doran said overseas recruitment was not the answer because the majority of these nurses were on two-year contracts. “We are reaching a point where unless we can retain and recruit the numbers needed to run the health service, we’ll be in complete meltdown, with no hope whatsoever of delivering the health strategy, including manning the 700 extra acute beds promised by the end of the year.”
HSEA industrial relations officer Brendan Mulligan, who refused to comment on the benchmarking report, said: “If there are nursing shortages, they are primarily because of an expansion of services.”
Health Minister Micheál Martin said the department had already committed in excess of 6.35 million to a recruitment and retention initiative and that under benchmarking, nurses’ salaries would have gone up between 10%-30% since 1996.
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