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.

Put another way, it equated with 31,650 hours per week, or enough overtime to keep 812 full-time nurses occupied. If this situation persists, and currently it looks unlikely to change, the bill for overtime to nurses for this year will reach an incredible 36 million euro, a prognosis which would be very unhealthy for the health service.

The main problem is that the health service cannot entice nurses to remain within it, largely because of the level of pay it offers, which was not resolved satisfactorily by the benchmarking process.

Despite a recruitment drive by the health services in the 12 months to the end of last January, 3,128 nurses left the service, either to retire, resign or find other employers. Of the actual increase of 2,380 nurses who are still working in the system, overseas recruitment brought in 1,817, considerably more than half.

But the induction of the latter, while welcome, is only a short-term stop-gap answer for the simple reason that their contracts are only for two-year periods.

What seems inevitable, is that there is going to be a shortage of nurses into the foreseeable future, which will have a consequential adverse effect on the Government’s promise to provide 700 extra acute beds by the end of this year.

According to the Health Service Employers Agency, the nursing shortages are caused because of an expansion of services. That, however, would appear to be rather a specious argument, because such expansion cannot happen without adequate resources.

Certainly, any expansion of the health services cannot, and should not, depend on stretching the nursing resources beyond levels which are not in their interests and obviously not in the interests of those in their care.

That will have a greater impact on patients relying on the public hospitals, rather than those who can afford private health insurance. Indeed, the increased charges for accident and emergency treatment announced by Minister for Health Micheál Martin at the weekend will only further compound the public’s perception that the health service is not customer, or patient, friendly.

The new charge of 40 on patients admitted to hospital emergency centres, represents an increase of about 30%, which will put many people to the pin of their collar to pay for it.

If it is a measure designed to dissuade people from abusing the A&E service, and to use their GPs instead, then it is rather ironic.

To adopt such a tactic at a time when the Government is concerned about unwarranted price hikes by health professionals, including doctors, is not too clever.