Flexibility on the frontline

Madam, – I was pleased to read the strong commitment to “frontline services” reported from HSE Chief Executive Cathal Magee …

Madam, – I was pleased to read the strong commitment to “frontline services” reported from HSE Chief Executive Cathal Magee in his submission to the Oireachtas health committee (Home News, November 26th) He highlights a difficulty we at Leopardstown Park Hospital have with the inflexibilities in the moratorium on recruitment.

A fundamental duty of health professionals is one of care for our patients and a moratorium that inhibits our ability to deliver care is flawed. I fully agree with Mr Magee that these inflexibilities have a direct impact on services to patients. I further agree that replacing retiring/ pregnant/ resigning nurses with “agency” nurses is a costly and professionally unsatisfactory solution. Nor can agency nurses ever fit key nursing positions like director/assistant director of nursing or specialist clinical nurse managers.

In our specific case where we offer very specialised care to vulnerable geriatric and cognitively impaired patients, part-time and inconsistant nursing is doubly unsatisfactory. As the board of the hospital we cannot tolerate any outcome arising from a reduction in nursing staff that could affect the health, safety and well-being of our patients. We have made this point repeatedly to the HSE. I now hope, following his comments, that Mr Magee will support our position.

By the same token I heard Liam Doran of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation making a similar point about patient safety and related matters. I would appeal to him and his officials at local level to allow more flexibility in their position on changing conditions in nursing care requirements.

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Many of us in the frontline of health service provision are, in the best of goodwill, committed to the objectives outlined by the Minister for Health and in the four-year recovery plan, but we ask for sufficient flexibility to allow us to eliminate any threat to the good safe cost-effective patient care we are entrusted to provide. – Yours, etc,

EUGENE F MAGEE,

Chairman,

Leopardstown Park Hospital,

Dublin 18.