HSE chief admits recruitment ban is creating problems for health service

THE head of the Health Service Executive (HSE) has admitted the ban on staff recruitment is creating difficulties across the health service.

However, Cathal Magee said the executive “will intervene” and “support any interventions that are there” to protect quality of patient care.

Mr Magee was addressing the annual delegate conference of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation in Kilkenny, where nurses outlined the daily challenges posed by the recruitment ban. It was the first time a HSE chief executive had addressed the conference.

Breedge Scanlon, who works at St John’s community hospital in Sligo, said staffing levels had been steadily eroded since the introduction of the moratorium.

“And who suffers? The patient. And who carries the can? The nurse of course,” she said.

“We need enough nurses to give proper care to patients, that is, wash them, feed them and keep them alive. And we basically don’t have that now,” she said.

“In the ward that I work in there’s 43 patients and there have been times over the last few weeks when we just basically were not able to feed the patients that are totally dependent and we made our management aware and nothing was done.

“We just have to do it some way or another. There was nothing put in. There was nothing done for us.

“So when a relative complains — mostly the patients aren’t able to complain — it’s not management that takes it on, we are blamed and we’re the ones that are investigated.”

Ms Scanlon said normal nursing activities “likehygiene, feeding the patients, getting them out of bed, all of those things are majorly affected… There would be days when you would have to prioritise… Really every human being is entitled to a shower every day if they need it or they want it. If you just don’t have the hands to do it you cannot do it.”

However, Ms Scanlon subsequently said patients were “not missing meals, nobody is being starved to death” and that feeding and washing of patients was a priority, but that social activities at St John’s had “gone out the door because we don’t have the time”.

Anne Burke, who works in the emergency department (ED) at University College Hospital Galway, said she had been “left with one nurse at 4am to look after 40 patients”.

Ms Burke said patients in ED “in the majority of cases were not behind the comfort of a curtain, but in every nook and cranny of the ED”, including beside sluice rooms and bins.

Nurses voted in favour of a motion opposing placing extra beds on hospital wards to take the pressure off EDs and reaffirming their support for industrial action in cases where this happened.

Sandra Morton raised the issue of cross-infection where patients from EDs are placed on wards. Her father, a farmer, had questioned this practice when hospitalised with the vomiting bug.

“It’s like this — if you’ve one calf in a pen with scour, they’ll all have it by the evening,” he told the nurse.

INMO deputy general secretary Dave Hughes said there was greater regulation of animals in the food chain than of patients moved onto wards from EDs.

Health Minister James Reilly is due to attend the conference today.