So many nurses trained in Ireland feel they have no choice but to move abroad that hospitals in this country are now dependent on “robbing” staff from African and other non-EU countries, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO).
Despite this, INMO general secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said the system requires “a minimum of 1,500 additional nurses just to have a safe level of care”.
At a press conference on Tuesday the union highlighted what it said was the worst year for people being left to wait on trolleys for treatment in emergency departments (EDs) since it started to collate figures on the issue 16 years ago.
Ms Ní Sheaghdha said a combination of work pressures and financial issues, including a lack of affordable housing, had left the Irish health service increasingly reliant on staff recruited from non-EU countries.
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“We are facing a situation where we are now completely dependent on overseas non-EU recruitment for nurses and midwives,” said Ms Ní Sheaghdha. “That was a situation that didn’t appear in midwifery services until last year.
“What’s happened in Ireland here this year is that we have registered just over 1,400 nurses who have qualified here and we have registered 3,500 from non-EU countries. So we are forcing our own to emigrate and then going to non-EU countries and robbing them of their essential workers. There is something fundamentally flawed with that.
“We are now having to recruit midwives from Ghana and from other African countries. Now we know the situation in these countries, we know what their health services are like and how they desperately need their own essential workers but a country like Ireland, because of its bad policy, because of its lack of investment, is now going to these countries and taking their essential workers.”
Ms Ní Sheaghdha was speaking at an INMO event to highlight figures it said show the situation in emergency departments has continued to worsen this year despite repeated commitments to tackling the issue by Government.
Since 2006, when Mary Harney said that the then government would put an end to people having to wait on trolleys in EDs, the union has issued a daily figure each weekday for the number of people on trolleys that morning. The cumulative figure for 2022 stood at 100,195 on Tuesday and the organisation says that this is the earliest in any year that the 100,000 figure has been exceeded.
Ms Ní Sheaghdha said previous experience shows the figures serve as an indicator of the scale of the problems that will be experienced in EDs in winter.
The union is calling for a greater use of private hospitals for non-urgent elective care, new measures to retain staff and new legislation to protect them in the workplace.
“We are now calling on the Government to deal with this unsafe, unacceptable and inhumane situation,” she said.
The Department of Health said the Minister, Stephen Donnelly, “acknowledges the distress overcrowded emergency departments cause to patients, their families and frontline staff working in very challenging conditions in hospitals throughout the country”. It said he has visited EDs across the country to hear directly from staff and patients.
“We are experiencing a very challenging start to winter, and already our emergency departments are experiencing high levels of daily presentations and congestion,” it said. “Attendances are 13.6 per cent higher than the five-year average [2017-2021] for this period, with almost 1.2 million patients attending EDs by the end of October 2022.”
The department said many patients were presenting with more complex health issues and requiring longer hospital stays due to the ageing population.
“The Government has provided significant resources to the HSE over the past 2½ years to mitigate the additional pressure on emergency departments throughout the winter period. Since January 1st, 2020 we have delivered over 920 new acute hospital beds and over 340 community beds. The health service has also hired over 15,000 extra staff since the start of 2020. This includes 4,500 nurses and midwives, 2,300 health and social care professionals and 1,400 doctors and dentists.”
