The Irish Nurses' Organisation has rejected claims that emergency cover at the State's largest children's hospital is inadequate.
An ambulance taking a baby with a heart condition to the airport en route to a hospital in Birmingham, left the grounds of Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, at about 10.30 a.m. yesterday.
"Patients should be coming into a hospital, not leaving it," said one staff member who did not wish to be named. There was no indication, however, that children were being moved to a hospital in Glasgow, as had been suggested earlier.
In a waiting room, Ms Anne Skerritt from Wexford sat with her nine-year-old daughter, Vicky, who underwent open heart surgery three months ago. Ms Skerritt was worried because a doctor instead of a nurse was going to take the blood for Vicky's tests.
"If they can't get a vein it will be very stressful," she said. As it turned out, the procedure went smoothly, although she described the atmosphere in the hospital as "hectic".
Outside, concerned parents smoked cigarettes and swapped stories of how the strike was affecting them. One woman was worried because she had been told that if her six-month-old grandson, an epileptic, went home to Limerick, he would not be able to travel in an ambulance.
"The thought of me bringing him home in a train on a Friday afternoon is really worrying," she said.
Ms Sharon Kelly from Letterkenny was waiting to hear if her four-week-old son who had had a heart operation would be able to be moved to hospital in Donegal. "The hospital in Letterkenny are willing to take him but the strike committee there are opposing it," she said.
Final-year medical students were being drafted in to change babies' nappies in the hospital and parents were being asked to feed and change their children. Where some parents were not able to be present, other parents were helping to care for the children.
Mr Eddie O'Callaghan's four-year-old daughter was taken into hospital on Saturday with septicaemia and since Tuesday he has witnessed the effects of the strike first hand.
A doctor had to administer antibiotics to his daughter but had problems finding a vein in her arm and had to switch to her foot. "They are really stressed out," he said. One doctor told him he was doing the job of 10 nurses.
Mr O'Callaghan also described how some children have been left crying for up to an hour in wards where there are only two nurses rostered.
Only 118 beds are occupied in the hospital which can accommodate 258 patients, while only four of the hospital's wards are open. Despite all this, the nurses at the hospital are almost universally supported by the parents.
Ms Alison Fennell's three-year-old daughter, Thea, was born with hydrocephalus (fluid on the brain) and has been a patient at Crumlin for much of her life.
"The thought that public opinion of nurses may go down because of the strike is awful . . . the parents of long-term patients are in the best position to know about how hard nurses work and we would support them no matter how long the strike goes on," she said.
"The medical care is the same as it always has been; the nurses are working even more hours than they have been rostered." There was a concern though, she added, that the staff would "run into trouble" if the strike continued over the weekend.