The Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) has said its members will take industrial action from Tuesday, September 17th as a result of an ongoing dispute over staffing levels in mental services across the country.
The association said it would initially target its actions to take place in areas where recent graduates of psychiatric nursing courses have not been offered jobs.
The industrial action is likely to start with a work to rule but details are to be decided upon at a meeting of the union’s national council next week.
The union first announced its intention to take action in July but the move has been postponed twice in order to allow for engagement with the Department of Health and HSE the Health Service Executive.
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The most recent talks took place on Wednesday but no agreement has been reached on recruitment, with the HSE having previously said it is bound by limits on budgets and recruitment set out recently in its pay and numbers strategy (PNS).
On Thursday, after a lengthy meeting of its board to consider its position, the union again said there were 700 nursing vacancies in the country’s mental health services, many of them in key supervisory roles, but it expressed particular disappointment that, it said, newly qualified nurses were not being hired in some areas of the country.
“With these new graduate nurses now coming on stream the failure of the HSE to recruit them into our mental health services in a number of areas of the country means they will be lost to the private sector and attracted to posts abroad,” said PNA general secretary Peter Hughes.
“This cannot be allowed to happen at a time when our mental health services are struggling to cope with 700 vacancies and are being maintained through a reliance on agency staff and overtime.
“The issue the recruitment of new graduate nurses is time critical and if these graduates are not taken on immediately, they will be lost to our services. There is no question that given the levels of understaffing in mental health that there is scope for every graduate nurse to be taken on,” he said.
“In response to this situation PNA is left with no option but to commence industrial action on Tuesday, September 17th. This action will commence in mental health services in areas where all new graduates have not been offered permanent contracts. We believe that such a decision is the only way to attempt to safeguard the future of our services and our graduates.”
In response, the CEO of the HSE Bernard Gloster said: “Staffing in the HSE has expanded beyond what it ever was and that includes psychiatric nursing.
“We will continue to engage with the PNA and address some of the legitimate concerns they have, but that requires us to work together, and I would be very hopeful that we can avoid the threat of industrial action.”
The HSE previously pointed to the constraints on recruitment set out in the PNS as being in part of consequence of earlier over-recruitment, pointing to an increase in staff number of 25,000 since 2020.
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