St Vincent's nurses to start work-to-rule

Nurses at St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin will protest this lunchtime at overcrowding in the hospital's emergency department.

Members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation say there has been a failure to acknowledge the problem and the number of patients on trolleys in the emergency department is being understated.

They will begin a work-to-rule from tomorrow, following a recent ballot for action.

Management at the hospital said they deeply regretted the decision of nurses to embark on industrial action.

According to the INMO’s trolley watch statistics, 3,331 patients spent time on a trolley in the hospital's emergency department, awaiting an in-patient bed, from January to August this year - an increase of 137% on the same period in 2014.