Health service faces turmoil with hospitals failing to cope

THE health service is facing into a weekend of turmoil with hospitals across the country failing to cope after just three days of the work-to-rule by nurses.

However, the Psychiatric Nurses’ Association (PNA) and Irish Nurses’ Organisation (INO) have hailed their work-to-rule a success. They believe hospital management is having to work hard to cover the work their members normally do.

Des Kavanagh of the PNA said: “We are very pleased with the impact of the work-to-rule. Managers are complaining about the work it is putting on them.”

With the escalation of the protest to rolling work stoppages next week, the unions could hold fire “at this stage” on full strike action, he said. However, action would be stepped up if it was found that management was found to be “adjusting the extra work.”

For next Wednesday’s escalation, he said the plan was to pick three or four services at the same time in one area.

Mr Kavanagh said, unlike the last action by nurses in 1999, which also came before a bank holiday, the unions were determined their members would not be left to carry the can.

“In 1999, we were on strike; it was a long bank holiday weekend and the management went home, put their feet up and drank a cup of tea. We were on duty the whole weekend managing that service.

“On this occasion, we are creating no comfort zone for the employers, but we will take care of the patients.”

He said nurses were managing their action in such a way that the management would have to play an active roll in the running of thefacilities this weekend.

However, it is not only hospital management who will be under pressure over the weekend and into next week. Irish Association for Emergency Medicine president Fergal Hickey, a consultant in Sligo, said emergency doctors were fearful of the knock-on effects of the work-to-rule.

“We are looking at the upcoming weekend with a lot of trepidation. If you take it that the number of patients waiting for admission in emergency departments is likely to rise, then, even before next Wednesday comes, we will have got to a very difficult situation.

“The more an emergency department is taken up with patients who have had their episode of emergency care and need to be in a hospital bed, then the less well an emergency department can function. And, if that is the backdrop against which we are working over the next few days, then when they do move to rolling work stoppages, that is just going to compound the situation.”

He said the information he had received from around the country was that things were deteriorating.

“The experience for individual patients coming to emergency departments is that it is getting worse, because of increasing numbers of delays and also the difficulty of delays to hospital discharge in that patients who would normally be leaving a hospital beds are not able to leave as quickly as previously and therefore the number of patients waiting for hospital admissions in emergency departments is increasing.

“Things that would have been done on the computer are being done manually. That process is slower. It also means fewer people have access to that information, whereas on the computer system a number of people can access it at the same time. Obviously, the work that is not being done by nursing staff is having to be done by others. That includes medical staff and also administrative and clerical staff.

“Medical staff would be familiar with many of these particular processes, but obviously the others may be less familiar and less efficient at doing it. That brings about further delays. As this dispute becomes more protracted, the goodwill that individual nurses are displaying may not continue and, likewise, the goodwill that medical and administrative staff are showing may not be sustained for a long period of time,” he said.