Nurses must be enticed to stay on

IT seems ludicrous for the country's health boards to be paying out huge sums in overtime payments to nurses, when the same resources could be used to make more attractive the employment of permanent staff.

What is happening at the moment is neither conducive to proper patient care nor to the well-being of nurses because of the inordinate hours of overtime they have to put in.

For the first month of this year, the 10 health boards paid out more than 3 million euro to nurses across all grades. According to the Health Service Employers Agency, this represented a total of 4,521 hours of overtime every single day during last January.