HSE recruitment freeze placing nurses in 'high-risk scenarios', say INMO

INMO General Secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha, said: "The recruitment moratorium must be reversed urgently.” File picture: Andy Gibson

The HSE's recruitment moratorium will have detrimental outcomes on patient care in the long term and should be "reversed urgently", the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation has (INMO) has said.

The INMO says its members are facing "very high-risk scenarios" with their working environments now posing "real and present risks to their ability to provide timely and safe care to patients which in turn exposes them to potential regulatory inquiries and unsafe working conditions."

According to new HSE figures, emergency department attendances across Irish hospitals during the first nine weeks of this year were up 13% on the same period in 2023.

Indeed, many hospitals have seen consistently high numbers of patients without beds in recent weeks. As of 8am on Thursday morning, there were some 452 patients waiting on trolleys in hospitals nationwide — 356 at EDs, and 96 on other hospital wards.

At University Hospital Limerick, there were 50 patients without beds in its ED and 50 more without beds in other wards. Fifty-two patients were also waiting on trolleys at the ED of Mater Misericordiae University hospital, while 45 patients were without a bed at Cork University Hospital — 37 in its ED and eight elsewhere in the hospital.

“None of the problems that are currently facing the health service have come out of nowhere," said INMO General Secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha.

"We have fewer GPs, so for many people going to their local ED is now the first port of call rather than a last resort.”

Ms Ní Sheaghdha said that a recruitment moratorium on patient-facing staff is not the answer to the challenges facing the HSE and that staff who are leaving the health service for retirement and other reasons are not being replaced.

"This is having an extremely damaging impact on patient safety and staff morale," she said.

The HSE recruitment freeze is going to have detrimental outcomes on patient care in the long term but also on the ability to retain staff into the future. The recruitment moratorium must be reversed urgently.

It comes as a new report found that inpatient and outpatient attendances rose by 7% and 17% respectively at Children's Health Ireland (CHI) at Tallaght in 2022.

CHI's Annual Report 2022, published earlier this week, also found that ED and urgent care presentations increased by 29% to 153,533, and the average stay of for child patients at CHI Tallaght increased from 4.7 days in 2021 to 5.08 days in 2022.

In her introduction to the report, CHI chief executive Eilísh Hardiman said the increases were driven by high numbers of sick children presenting with winter and respiratory viruses between October and December 2022, as CHI continued to recover from the covid-19 pandemic and the 2021 HSE cyberattack.