FG-FF deal completely inadequate on health, nurses say

The new agreement between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil on how the country will be governed is "minimalist and completely inadequate" in relation to its provisions for developing the health service, nurses have argued.

Speaking at the opening of his union's annual conference in Killarney, the general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), Liam Doran, said if anyone needed to spend weeks and weeks in talks to conclude that the health service needed multi-year funding then "they have not been living on planet Earth".

"The idea that €15 million should go to the National Treatment Purchase Fund to tackle waiting lists, while welcome, is just minimal ," he said.

“The document is health light. It is light on reform, it is light on real change and it is light on what actually has to be done to tackle the problems that our members experience and patients encounter every day.”

Mr Doran said the agreement represented a very inadequate and minimalist approach.

The INMO also indicated that it would be seeking a full review of the terms and conditions of nurses and midwives given the major changes to their role over recent years.

The union is also looking for the government to roll back the additional working hours which nurses were obliged to work for free over recent years.

It said the health service was experiencing a recruitment and retention crisis.

The INMO again called for the establishment of a “health summit” in which all interested parties would be brought together to work out what type of health service the country “needs, deserves and requires” for the coming decades.

Mr Doran maintained that a health service “cannot be planned from one election to another”.

“”You have to have a fundamental view as a society, led by elected politicians, as to what is required.”

”What is required is a single- tier system where money does not buy speed of access. A system that is wide enough and deep enough to deal with people as they present.”

Properly funded

He said this did not mean that there would have to be a hospital at every crossroads and did not mean diagnostics being available 24-hours per day in every hospital in Ireland. He said decisions would have to be taken but that the measures agreed would have to be properly funded.

Mr Doran said that if TDs in Leinster House had to share their offices, three or four to a room, as elderly and frail people had to share cubicles in hospital emergency departments, “there would be a Dáil committee building a four-storey building in Kildare St before the week would be out”.

He said while the discussions between politicians on water charges were going on, at the same time there were 350 people or more on trolleys in hospitals.

Mr Doran said the INMO would be publishing figures shortly to show that acute hospitals were short of hundreds of nurses.

He said most hospitals had about 80 - 100 nurse vacancies. He said he was not saying that hospitals were not trying to recruiting but rather that they could not fill these positions.

He said if the problems being experienced in emergency departments were to be addressed and if waiting lists were to be brought down, a total of 1,500 additional hospital beds would have to be provided.

He said 2,000 additional long term care beds were also needed.

Mr Doran said the proposed new commission on public service pay, which is set out in the agreement, had potential.

“We believe the whole of nursing and midwifery needs to have its pay examined in the context of the revised role nurses and midwives now play since 2001 when it was last assessed. It is a massively different role now,” he said.

“If that process offers an opportunity to do that, we will certainly welcome it and see where it takes us.”