Nurses are ‘leaving in droves because this is not what they signed up to do’

There may always have been issues with the Irish health service but Ann Noonan certainly remembers a time when she thought nursing was a hugely rewarding career and looked forward to going to work every day. Now, she says, she has grown used to seeing colleagues struggling to get through days during which they are expected to do not just their own work but a portion of the work of the many staff who are not there.

“There is up to a 30 per cent [staffing] deficit on wards,” she says of University Hospital Limerick where she has spent all but six months of a 39-year career. “What that means in practical terms is that you go to work each day but you can’t do the job you trained to do because you are trying to do somebody else’s as well.

Speaking to The Irish Times on the first day of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation’s annual delegate conference in Killarney on Wednesday, Noonan said: “In our hospital today there are 124 patients on trolleys. These people are at their most vulnerable when they’re admitted to a hospital. You’re in a pair of pyjamas. You’re on a trolley and you’re looking for somebody to even just take you to the toilet. I’m 55 years-old and the people I trained with are leaving in droves because this is not what they signed up to do.

“They signed up to care for patients and give them the best care. And I can remember when we used to be able to really care for the patients we were looking after, emotionally as well as physically, but now we struggle to meet even their most basic, fundamental needs.

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“Then on top of the fact that you have a patient that you can’t give that basic care but you have the relatives who are not happy and tend to take it out on the staff. So you’re overworked, understaffed because there are too many patients and the relatives who are, understandably, not happy with the service they are getting.”

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Nurses were “overwhelmed – that’s the word I’d use – by it all,” she continued.

“If Messi or Ronaldo or any of those play a good game, what do they do for the next few days… they rest and get ready for their next big game. For the last five years we’ve had a big game every day.”

Ms Noonan, who earns around €52,500 a year, works in theatre where safety and scheduling requirements mean things are not as unpredictable as across other departments in a major acute hospital but some colleagues, she says, are routinely redeployed from relatively a well-staffed ward to a short-staffed one at short notice.

It is no surprise, she says, that so many newly qualified nurses get their first taste of work in an Irish hospital and then feel the draw of better-resourced services abroad, often in country’s where housing isn’t quite the problem it is in Ireland.

“So it’s not just nurses my age, it’s nurses of every age leaving. They are incentivised by the housing and they are incentivised by the working conditions. And you can’t blame a nurse who is not tied down by children or a mortgage for feeling far away fields are greener because, I have to say, nursing is a great job, as in, it’s a very rewarding job when you get to do it right but it’s nearly pie in the sky now, the way you’re supposed to do it.”