We need your help now
Support from readers like you keeps The Journal open.
You are visiting us because we have something you value. Independent, unbiased news that tells the truth. Advertising revenue goes some way to support our mission, but this year it has not been enough.
If you've seen value in our reporting, please contribute what you can, so we can continue to produce accurate and meaningful journalism. For everyone who needs it.
Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
By continuing, you are indicating that you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
STAFF AT OUR Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda will today hold a work to rule in protest over staff shortages in the hospital.
Currently there are 104 unfilled whole-time equivalent positions in the hospital, leaving the nurses in the hospital struggling to provide adequate care for patients.
Today’s action is being organised by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) and will see nurses limiting themselves to core care duties, with them not attending non-clinical meetings, inputting computer data, or answering telephones.
“If you had a bus company that had five buses yet they only had three drivers,” said Tony Fitzpatrick, INMO representative for the North Eastern Area on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, “they wouldn’t say carry on regardless and drive the five buses with three drivers.”
Yet in an acute ward where you have seriously ill patients it is expected within the HSE that three nurses would carry on and look after the three patients.
Today’s work to rule will be coming into effect after talks at the Workplace Relations Commision broke down on Friday.
The Emergency Department in the hospital will remain open today, although a number of operations have been cancelled.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
My father went up there last Wednesday for a simple procedure, didn’t get a bed until Friday, had the procedure on Friday but by the time the result came back, 4-30pm the doctor had gone home so as there was nobody there to read his results he had to stay in all weekend until yesterday when the original doctor could read his results… What a waste of a bed.
There really appears to be a massive work imbalance when it comes to some doctors. Junior doctors and nurses seem to be the bread and butter covering the 24hrs of a day. But once you leave the realms of junior doctor it’s like there’s only a 9-5 mon-fri approach. But daft really.
Solidarity with the nurses trying to hold together a crumbling system. The government have savaged the wages and working conditions of graduate nurses to help pay for the debts of the bankers. Many have been forced to emigrate and most won’t return to be exploited to pay for a crisis they didn’t create.
More broadly, the interests of private capital always take precedence over the welfare of the majority and this is why our public health system is always dysfunctional as explained by Gene Kerrigan below:
“Here is my favourite-ever quote from a politician. It’s from Brendan Howlin, the current Minister for Thrashing the Social Infrastructure.
No, it’s not the quote from 2011, just before the election, when he asked for our votes and told us: “We are against water charges.”
No, it’s from an interview Brendan gave about a decade after he was Minister for Health. Being a thoughtful man, he had spent some time reflecting on his experience in coalition. He wondered why he and others had failed to deliver “a first-class public health system”.
He had since realised, he told author Maev-Ann Wren:”If we did that, there would be no reason for sustaining a private system.”
And the right-wing want a thriving private health market. They want, according to Brendan, around 30pc of people to pay for private health products.
However, he said: “In order for that to happen, they really required the public [health] system to be inferior. Why else, if it was first-rate, would people pay for a private system?”
That’s the sound of a penny dropping.”
If the lives of the political and corporate elites depended on the public health system as ours do, then it would function like a well oiled machine.
You have my 100% support
Maybe now Leo has exited he might have something to say about this. Good luck today with the strike.
My elderly mother has COPD and needs regular IV antibiotic’s “as oral antibiotics don’t work anymore” when she gets a chest infection. She has to be transported by ambulance to the A+E Department from the nursing home where she will have the IV inserted. There she will have to take up a bed in the hospital for the next five days. This is happening throughout the country. Why is it that a GP or a specialist nurse cannot insert a cannula in the nursing home instead ? and she receive treatment where she is. This would free up a lot of hospital beds t for elective surgery. Is this how we treat our elderly who built up this country to what it is today ?
They have to be sure it is exacerbation of COPD so they want to do tests that aren’t available in nursing home e.g. Xray etc as although she has a chronic condition there is a possibility it could be something else. Once it is proven and they have started their IV and are responding to it I agree they should be back in the nursing home getting treatment
Hi COS.The community intervention team covers drogheda as far as I know.They and OPAT Nurses administer Iv antibiotics once a referral is sent by their consultant when in hospital to facilitate early discharge.Hope this helps.
Lets see how WonderBoy handles the HSE!
I’m a nurse and in the past few years I’ve seen a very worrying decline in staffing numbers. In my area we used to just about manage on 13 nurses on a day shift. Now the norm is 8-10. Some days last week we had 7. Every shift has several overtime slots but nobody wants to take on overtime. We are trying to work our Haddington road days too and people are shattered and have low morale. We are hemorrhaging nurses to the middle east. I’m extremely worried about our health system. The government have not woken up.
Nurses pay for their “training”, college fees and associated costs.
My Hart go’s out to the nurses they put up with some amount of crap. They need more respect for work they do .
@eoin – Nurses will never get respect from a Gov. in this country. Gov. After Gov. continue to pull at their heart strings. Nurses need lower hours in line with other civil servants & a wage increase. Few are remaining in this country after their training is completed – could you blame them.
Fair play to the nurses. They do tremendous work. Hope Simon Harris doesn’t try and implement the NHS model of trusts here. They are not all they are made out to be. Sort out the mismanagement.
Why do we spend millions every year training nurses and not put in place a contract stating they have to work in a Irish public hospital for a certain number of years.
Why do we spend millions every year paying for people to do the leaving cert and other university graduates. Should they not then be expected to work for less pay and poorer conditions than they could get abroad in gratitude? What do you suggest border police carrying out interviews at airports?
I suggest you don’t get your degree till you complete a few years working in an Irish hospital or else you pay back the cost of your training. It not an uncommon practice to become an accountant or a solicitor.
Why don’t we force everyone who ever got a grant for a university degree to work in ireland? All these lazy people on the dole and the ones leaving the country to work somewhere else? Logic….anyone?
@mickmc
This is the most stupid I’ll-thought comment on the journal for a while.
I would not do nursing for the money they get and on top of that they actually do more work in university than any other graduate due to working in hospitals as well as being in college. If you had said EVERY graduate must work cheaply for the State for a few years then you might have had a point, but to pick on just nurses?? Cop on.
Who said cheaply. I’d pay them the same as fully qualified nurses. This practice is not uncommon in the accounting or legal profession. A company will take you on, they pay your college fee, pay you a trainee wage and in return you sign a contract saying you will work for them when you graduate for a number of year. As a graduate if you don’t fulfill your side of the contract I assume there be legal ramifications.
Or you can give the nurses an incentive to stay, like a decent wage? I can’t think of anyone who would sign a contract which forces them to remain in this country, god forbid.
The fact that you present an idea which is resorting to essentially forcing people to stay in Ireland, clearly shows how much desperate state this nation is in.
Well it’s quiet common in the 2 professions I mentioned earlier and I don’t think anyone there feels forced to stay. You sign up for the job you know the T&C.
It is quite common. You’re right, but these are companies, not states. I also can’t imagine it is very common in Ireland considering the State pays the tuition fees. So what you are suggesting is that the State from here on out stops paying the tuition fees for 3rd level education and instead presents a contract when they are applying for the CAO or finish the LC which says ‘if you want to go to college, you have to stay in Ireland for a number of years because we can’t be arsed fixing our crumbling system and instead we decide to destroy another system, the education system.
It’s either that or you pay the crippling tuition fees. Have a nice day’. So rather then paying nurses a decent wage, like most other nations do, you think it’s a better idea for the State to stop essentially free 3rd level education and instead blackmail students. All this instead of giving an incentive to stay.
My Girlfriend is a nurse and we are more than likely moving to Birmingham in January, as they offered a much higher pay rate, an upfront payment of a few thousand and essentially free accommodation until we find our feet. Why not do that instead? Why not just increase the pay?
A state shouldn’t have to blackmail graduates to stay, that just shows how much of a failure the state is.
And before you girlfriend started her degree did she not know the pay and conditions of the job she finish up in. I too could give you a list of complains about my job, it far from perfect and the wages aren’t wonderful but I’m sure your not interested. To be frank I say the same about your girlfriends job. Incidentally I live and worked in Birmingham for a few year and it not the worse spot in the world. I gained a lot of experience there and look back at my days there with a lot of affection.
Mickmc I trained as a nurse, so you want to bind me to a contract where I have to stay in a job because I trained in it, why don’t we do that for everyone and that way nobody has a choice in what they do after their education. Oh let’s not forget that the state gets hundreds of hours of labour for free from nurses during there training, there are lots of unpaid clinical hours, where you learn and act under the direction of senior staff, then you get to your internship where I was paid less than the minimum wage until qualified, the first twelve weeks I earned 6.42 per hour, then 7.02 true next then 7.42 the next 12 weeks would you work 36 hours per week for that money, I suppose you will say well lots of interships are unpaid and yes you are right but those internships you aren’t fully accountable for your interventions where you are with nursing. Oh and then thanks to the Harrington rd agreement you have to work an extra 12 hour shift per month for nothing FREE.. I doubt your find too many people who would work for free, they also tried to bring in a graduate scheme where they started fully qualified nurse in 24k per year, thankfully that fell on it’s back. 4 years of uni for 24k? Long hours stressful work, even now starting pay for a qualified nurse is 27k per year you’ll notice that is a lot less than what Luas drivers earn, pay should reflect responsibility. In response to another question on here it’s now a degree as nurse at increasing taking on more complex and varied responsibilities and to have the appropriate skills, also it has something to do with nurses contributions in the area of medicine being more respected and to be seen as a clinical profession rather than a vocation that people like doing.
Ireland has 12 nurses per 1,000 population compared to an OECD average of 9. There is no shortage of working nurses in Ireland. Union inflexibility is the real issue.
Just because they are produced Barry, does not mean they are here, and they are not. America, the UK and Australia have been snapping up Irish nurses like a game of snap. That is the issue, we failed so brilliantly in stemming the flow during the GFC that now there is a massive shortage of health-related staff.
Padraig, that figure captures nurses working in Ireland only. The Nursing Union insists on an unusually low nurse: patient ratio.
Can you give me your source? As if it comes from registered statistics it will be incorrect, as many keep up the registration. Privarte clinics cannot find staff, we cannot find staff in health related, it is not just patient ratio. Over 3000 nurses left for Australia between 2011 and 2014, I am not sure of the UK and US statistics but would be similar.
Looking at the stats, we make 1500 nurses per year.
Last year, 322 Irish nurses joined the register to work in the UK. It has also been a popular destination for Irish GPs, with more than 1,000 travelling across the Irish Sea between 2009 and 2013, a staggering figure, given that Ireland only trains 157 GPs a year.
Found it – between 2010 and 2015 almost 10,000 applied to leave for other countries – Certificates of Current Professional Status (CCPS)
I spent the past two weeks in the hospital with my special needs child in a paediatric unit not fit for your dog never mind your child. Some of the nurses were nice enough however, I have to say some were the old stock from times past and the manner of them I wouldn’t leave them look after an animal never mind a human. They are clearing out the unit by Friday even if your child is not fully recovered they lie to the doctors and surgeons about the fitness of the children to be discharged. They bully the parents into wanting to take them home even though you know as a parent the child really is not well enough. Over the two weeks come the Friday they were saying the child was well enough to go even though he has enlarged his heart due to stress of surgery and he is a survivor of open hear surgery. I nearly lost the rag and had to continually follow the nurses on the ward to administer the pain relief and antibiotics that he was taken. I had to change his bedding administer his pain relief and antibiotics myself. As he is incontinent I had to change his soiled pull ups and bring them into the area myself when the place dangerous waste, while they sat around yapping.
Bringing awareness to the issue is fine, but, there are simply no body’s here to fill the positions. There is an acute shortage of workers and no easy fix, to that problem.
Why do nurses need a degree to start with?
That genuine question you need to come to A&E
Back to bed with you Elizabeth, you dinosaur…what an idiotic, pathetic and insulting question…next time you’re in hospital why don’t you ask a nurse!!!
I thought that you should be caring, there are a lot of Care Assistants doing what Nurses did years ago, that would make much better Nurses than a lot of the Nurses with this so call Degree, I don’t think this degree would cover that.
There was a time when being a nurse involved wearing increadibly impractible uniforms, learning how to make beds ina very precise manner, fold sheets, empty bedpans, fill out basic forms. They would apply what would now be considered first aid, bandages, dressings etc. They were there to assist the doctors and took instructions from them, it would have been unthinkable for a nurse to advise a doctor back then.
Over time this has changed considerably, more and more technology was introduced into nursing and more responsibility was placed onto individual nurses. It’s quite common now for a patient to be assessed by a triage nurse, perhaps have a cannula inserted and an ECG test carried out, he or she may also decide if other tests are required and either request these or alert a doctor. He or she may take bloods and decide on these and the outcome of other tests, urine, X-Ray etc. and watching the patients monitoring how to advise the doctor when they arrive.
This is partly why a nurse needs a degree, there’s a lot more to it, but as the world changed nursing changed and adapted with it, in a modern hospital the first contact a patient has is with a nurse and it’s them who will advise the doctors. Something that just wouldn’t have happened 40 or 50 years ago.
Actually Care Assistants do do much and are not recognised, Nurses are not doctors so do what they say, so there isn’t much difference as Nurses used to be a caring profession years ago. So Padraig if you actually read you would know that much.
I know plenty of nurses that should not be nurses, they don’t have caring bone in their body. No degree can replace that end of.
U must be a care assistant Elizabeth & hence the big chip on your shoulder.
@Elizabeth You may have a point, bear in mind however that in many of the hospitals, like the one in which those nurses are working to rule, they are extremely understaffed and overstretched which means they have to taken on extra duties. In todays litigious society this will also mean an enormous amount of paperwork which MUST be filled out correctly, failure to do so will not just mean loss of registration, but your job and the embarrassment of legal proceedings.
These days nurses are not given the time to care, the minimum amount (usually far too few) are assigned to a ward, considerably less on night shift, often a mixture of permanent and agency staff who change from day to day.
Health Care Assistants were only a relatively recent addition to hospitals, and even then they were introduced at a time that student nurses were removed from the wards as their role was changing from ward based training to a degree based course which required less time on the wards. The HCA’s role was to assist nurses, this was later expanded somewhat so that, with the necessary training, some could take basic observations, NIBP, SpO2 and temperature.
As you say I’ve seen overworked nurses who have had a tendency to forget who they’re there for, but I’ve also seen consultant HCA’s who believe they run the ward, nobody cares about the patients better than them and if it wasn’t for them the place would just collapse. One is a product of overwork in a jaded system, the other is a bully who can’t recognise they actually do little or nothing. Oh, and before you ask, no I’m not a nurse, but I spend a lot of time in hospitals.
I really hope you all get what you all deserve. behind you all 100%. fantastic staff all over our little country and absolutely no recognition.
@Elizabeth… No Nurses in the world, are practicing Nursing without proper education.. Yes, caring maybe acquired overnight , but educating them here ‘ with your opinions??? “I don’t think so”
have your say