Some 1,800 nurses left the Irish healthcare service to work overseas last year, while almost 3,000 have been recruited from abroad already in 2005, the majority of them from India, a conference heard yesterday.
President of the Irish Nurses Organisation Madeline Spiers called on the State to examine why it was failing to retain Irish-trained nurses.
Ms Spiers told the INO annual conference in Mullingar that a policy which sees the Republic recruit extensively from countries such as India, the Philippines and even Nigeria, while Irish-trained nurses and midwives emigrate to more attractive posts, had to be questioned.
"It strikes me as being short-sighted, disruptive to team working and contrary to developing and retaining a strong cohort of experienced nurses and midwives in all specialities."
The setting of minimum nurse- to-patient ratios also had to be looked at, she said. In the past year alone the INO had to seek independent reviews of staffing levels 34 times where it considered them to be so low they could impinge on patient care.
The conference was told the nurse retention problem was not just an issue for the Republic.
Ginette Rodger, chief nursing executive at Ottawa Hospital, said Canada would lose 40 per cent of its nurses over the next decade and the result would be bed closures and "a nightmare" for patients. Innovative solutions had to be found, she said.
Minister for Health Mary Harney told the conference that "relatively few of our nurses move abroad". The turnover rate here was down from 17 per cent in 1999 to 10 per cent in 2003 and it was expected, when 2004 figures were published shortly, that turnover would be down to 8 per cent.
She claimed that many of the 1,800 nurses who went abroad do so to travel rather than to work.
"We take about 8 to 9 per cent of our nursing manpower from overseas. That is not high. About 35 per cent of our non-consultant hospital doctors, for example, are foreign and in many of those countries, nurses would not be able to get a job."
Ms Harney said she wanted to make nursing attractive and she planned to give them more powers. Some patients with chronic illness could be more effectively managed by clinical nurse specialists than by consultants, she said. The plan to allow nurses to prescribe would be law by Christmas, she indicated.
She was questioned again about when phase 2b of Mullingar Hospital would open. A new wing of the hospital has been built for several years but only one of its five floors is in use.
She said the HSE was in talks with the hospital about staffing levels. "When those issues are agreed, which I hope will be very soon," she said "then we will be in a position to advance the provision of phase 2b and I'm committed to doing that. We have the money to do it. It's just a question of agreeing the staffing levels and so on. The onus is as much on the hospital as it is on the HSE to be fair, to have realistic levels."