For 22 years, Sarah Meagher worked as an emergency medicine nurse in Letterkenny University Hospital. The stress, anxiety and physical demands of the job, however, were a “big part” of her decision to change role.
Now working as a clinical nurse manager, Meagher is no longer in a patient-facing position, but said she still saw the pressure on the hospital system.
“The way our emergency department is divided up, if I’m just on the floor looking after patients I am one nurse potentially looking after 30 to 40 patients in an emergency department where they are a massive unknown,” she said.
“These are patients that haven’t been seen. They haven’t been diagnosed. They haven’t started treatment. It’s a complete unknown, and that’s where the highest risk is.”
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Meagher said the shifts were very hard physically, with staff on their feet for 13 hours. These also take a significant mental toll, as staff feel as though they are unable to care for patients as quickly as they would like.
The senior nurse, who is a member of the executive council of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), said in her hospital that patients were no longer just on trolleys while waiting for beds. Waiting times were now so long that patients were even waiting for access to trolleys, she said.
“We find it heartbreaking. It destroys us that we can’t go and do what it is we were trained to do, what we chose to do. It’s a personal thing. You’re dealing with humans. We want to go and do the best that we can do,” she told INMO’s annual conference in Dundalk, Co Louth, on Wednesday.
“To go into work knowing that I am not able to the best that I know I can do ... that’s heartbreaking. We see 60-, 70- and 80-year-olds sitting in a wheelchair for 24 hours with nowhere to lie them down. Literally nowhere to lie them down.”
Meagher is not the only nurse who has experienced stress, burnout and difficult working conditions in the line of duty.
A survey conducted by the INMO, published on Wednesday, found more than three-fifths of nurses and midwives (61.3 per cent) said they considered leaving their job in the past month, with workplace stress (27.3 per cent) cited as a primary reason followed by feeling undervalued (23.6 per cent).
More than two-thirds (67 per cent) of the survey’s respondents said their staffing levels and skill mix did not meet the required clinical and patient demands in their work area.
More than 39 per cent of nurses and midwives reported their work affected their psychological wellbeing and almost a quarter (24.1 per cent) reported attending their GP due to work-related stress in the past 12 months.
INMO general secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said the “standout finding” from this year’s survey was an increase in an intention to leave nursing.
“This is exactly what we don’t want. It is a statistic going the wrong way and it’s one that is very easily remedied because if you put in place correct staffing levels, we know from evidence in other countries that it retains people,” she said.
“Most nurses who go to work and midwives who go to work want to work in an environment where they’re not running to standstill, they’re not delayed in giving care to patients and their team is full.”
The HSE said the number of patients waiting on trolleys has been reducing, but the INMO has argued that last month was the worst April on record for overcrowding.
Between 2020 and 2025, the HSE increased its health workforce by 9,248 more nurses and midwives, Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has said previously in response to a parliamentary question.
A spokeswoman for HSE West and Northwest said “patient safety is at the forefront” of everything hospitals in the region did and she said initiatives were under way to reduce overcrowding in Letterkenny’s emergency department.
