Reilly’s nursing plan may threaten services

Hospitals across Ireland may be forced to cut back on already recession-hit services if Health Minister James Reilly stays loyal to his botched nurse graduate plan in its current form.

For the second time in a fortnight, the HSE was yesterday forced to scrap its own deadline for the controversial scheme — which is being boycotted by nurses’ unions — due to lack of interest from graduates.

Under the plan, 1,000 new nurses were to be appointed on 80% of normal starting salaries, saving the health service €10m.

However, as few as 40 people are believed to have applied, meaning hospitals will have to continue employing more costly agency workers to fill gaps caused by the HSE’s recruitment embargo.

As a result, the €10m saving already detailed in the HSE’s budget for this year will have to be found elsewhere by hospital managers, who must finalise their facility-specific budget plans in the coming weeks.

And with medical unions insisting there is no room for manoeuvre in terms of staff hours due to the already stretched nature of hospital workloads, managers may have no option but to cut back on services.

Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation general secretary Liam Doran told the Irish Examiner this situation was likely as “the graduate programme has not and will not attract the numbers the minister wants”.

The union chief said the only other option would be for the minister to open negotiations with nurses on how the graduate positions could be filled. However, Mr Doran stressed such talks would be based on any graduate posts offered having the same starting salary as existing nurses.

“There are ways of saving the €10m, and other than services, one of them is employing staff nurses instead of agency nurses,” he said.

“We would clearly accept a graduate programme with all the educational benefits it would bring; we would embrace that, but it has to include a real salary.

“The minister says this policy is not about cheap labour, but he has to prove it. At the moment all he is offering is a flawed programme with a token approach to education.”

Dr Reilly said his controversial scheme was in medics’ best interests.

Speaking at Mallow General Hospital yesterday, he said reports of just 40 applications were “inaccurate”.

However, like the HSE, he failed to reveal the exact number, only saying the figure was “considerably higher, more than double that”.

Asked how the graduate programme stand-off could be resolved, Dr Reilly said he was open to negotiations, but remained steadfast on the point that full salaries will not be provided.

“This [the programme] is not so much about saving money as about offering people the opportunity to stay here in this country to continue their training.

“I’m looking forward to re-engaging with the INMO on this so we can between us make this available to our young nurses whom we spent a lot of money training,” he said.