A UK hospital is delighted with its new recruits – 30 Irish nurses, fresh from graduation, writes RONAN McGREEVY
THE MANAGEMENT of the Royal Berkshire Hospital were so pleased they called in the television cameras.
Regional BBC news and the local newspaper were present for the arrival of 30 new nurses from abroad to solve a chronic manpower and acute financial problem.
The hospital, which is in Reading, 60km west of London, has staff shortages and is unable to recruit locally. Many nurses who graduate in the area choose the brighter lights of London instead.
The new arrivals at the Royal Berkshire were all recent Irish graduates. For most, it was their first job.
They were understandably ambivalent about it. On the one hand, they were excited about being away from home, all together and with all the training opportunities that they will be given.
On the other hand, there was the lingering disappointment that the same opportunities were not available at home.
According to Rachel Monahan (22), from Tipperary, it was hard to leave the family behind, but they had to do it to get work. "It started to become clear two years into our four-year course that we might have to go abroad for work. But Reading is only an hour on the plane, so we are very lucky," she told the Reading Evening Post.
Management were very pleased. The Irish nurses are well trained, flexible, English-speaking and university graduates. They will also save the hospital £4 million (€4.4 million) a year in the cost of paying agency nurses to deal with staff shortages along with providing continuity of care.
The hospital is going to employ another 15 Irish graduates in January and is planning to come over soon to recruit some more.
It may be good news for the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, but it is a telling reminder of the effect the HSE recruitment embargo is having on recent medical graduates.
Despite the severity of the recession in the UK, hospitals in the southeast of England are snapping up hundreds of Irish nursing graduates to fill their own shortages.
Getting nurses to move to London is not difficult, retaining them is another story given the high cost of living there and the pressures on family life.
Whipps Cross Hospital in east London, an institution associated with generations of Irish nurses, has recruited 132 more nurses from Ireland this year.
Among them was John Gilmore (22), who recently graduated from NUI Galway. Of his class of 100, 40 are now working at Whipps Cross. A few have got short-term contracts in University College Hospital, Galway, but the rest are facing emigration.
“Travelling was always part of what I wanted to do,” says Gilmore, “but I would like to have found my feet a bit more at home first.
“It is very hard – the transition from student to staff nurse, from where you are familiar and you know all the staff in the hospital, to somewhere where you have to learn a new system.”
When they started in 2005, the Celtic Tiger was still roaring. “We were told when we started that we were the most employable people in the country, and we were at the time,” he recalls.
Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) deputy general secretary Dave Hughes says he estimates that 90 per cent of the 1,600 nurses who graduated this year have emigrated or are considering going abroad.
“There is no chance of a graduate getting a full-time job in the HSE and he or she is doubly disadvantaged in getting temporary work because the temporary nurses, who do not have regular employment, are experienced and the graduates would hope to get six months before they are fully fledged. The chances of graduates even getting part-time jobs are very, very slim.”
A recent recruitment fair in the RDS attracted hundreds of Irish nurses. Many of the hospitals in the UK were offering subsidised accommodation and a free master’s programme.
Hughes says the difference between the present Irish graduates and the previous ones is that the present ones began studying at a time when there were labour shortages and nurses were being recruited from abroad.
They had a more than reasonable expectation of going straight into paid employment at home, probably the first generation of nurses to have that certainty.
“There was an assessment made of the number of nurses we would need over the next 10 years and the number of student nurses was carefully balanced to meet the requirements. The hope was that we would be self-sufficient, but the employment market has now dried up,” he explains.
The road to the UK is one well travelled by generations of Irish nurses. Between 1945 and 1946, more than 7,000 Irish women applied for employment papers to train as nurses in England. By 1971, one nurse in eight working in the NHS was Irish. Indeed, there were more Irish nurses practising then in the UK than there were at home in Ireland.
The number of Irish nurses going to train or work in England has always ebbed and flowed. “It is back to the trend when I started off as a nurse,” says nurse turned nursing recruitment specialist Kate Cowhig. “I may run a recruitment company, but I’m also a nurse. I remember the lonely times in London.”
Those who believe that salaries for public sector workers in a major city like London would be better paid than at home are going to be disappointed. The relatively generous salaries paid to public sector workers in Ireland during the boom years have not been replicated elsewhere.
The starting salary for a fully qualified nurse in Ireland is €31,000. In the UK it is £21,000 (€23,000), plus a London weighting of £4,000 (€4,400), still considerably less than at home, though the weakness of sterling distorts the relative purchasing powers of the respective salaries.
Cowhig says the packages offered by the NHS frequently include subsidised meals and accommodation and, most crucially, all post-graduate training is free.
“You’d be better off going to a centre of excellence and have the opportunity to upskill yourself, have a full-time permanent position than wait for the phone to ring all the time,” she says.
The question for many graduates is when, if ever, they will get a chance to come home.Hughes says many will never return to work in Ireland.
“A number of them will come back because they always do, but they don’t all come back. It could be years before they do come back, especially if things stay poor here for a long time.”