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MEMBERS OF THE Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) in Connolly Hospital will protest outside the hospital today to highlight excessive workloads and increasingly unsafe conditions.
The protest is set to take place at the main entrance of Connolly Hospital at 1pm this afternoon following warnings from nurses that staff are under increased pressure and patient care is being compromised.
The INMO says it has engaged with hospital management to find a resolution to this ongoing issue and are not satisfied with the response to the safety concerns raised.
Members are now calling on hospital management to restrict services, close beds and wards and divert scheduled care to private hospitals.
In a statement, the organisation said: “This action needs to be taken to protect standards of care, patients, and staff. While a recent recruitment initiative has had some success, many of the new recruits will not start until 2022.”
INMO Industrial Relations Officer Maurice Sheehan said its nurses had been through “a very challenging time” and are now heading into winter with “an increased workload and Covid still circulating”.
“Hospital management need to act urgently to keep staff and patients safe. Otherwise, services at the hospital will need to be scaled back to ensure safety for all,” he said.
“From the outset of the pandemic, management at Connolly Hospital chose to curtail some of their least essential services, they need to do so again.
“Today’s protest sends a clear message to hospital management that staff are not willing to continue providing care in a manner where the health and safety of patients and staff is at risk.”
Speaking anonymously, a nurse who has been working in the hospital all her life said she had “never seen anything like the low morale and exhaustion”.
“The waves of Covid were just so taxing and we are now facing huge volumes of patients coupled with staff shortages,” she said.
“It’s just not right. We’ve such a brilliant team in the hospital but they are at rock bottom.
“I’m seeing my colleagues leaving or thinking about leaving and this tide has to be turned right now or more staff are going to leave the service.”
The INMO has also called for services within the intensive care unit (ICU) at St Vincent’s University Hospital (SVUH) to be curtailed “until such a time that the unit is adequately staffed”.
It came after The Journal broke the story that ICU nurses at SVUH had been forced to use a baby monitor to watch patients in two particular beds as there are not enough staff members to cover every ICU bed.
“We’ve 18 beds; we should have 21 nurses, at least, on every shift. We average about 14 to 16 nurses, so we’re at least five or six short. It’s just chaotic,” one nurse told The Journal, adding that it had been “relentless” since the start of the pandemic.
In response to the story, the INMO noted: “On a daily basis the ICU in St Vincent’s University Hospital is running with 30% of its nursing shifts vacant. The hospital continues to operate 18 ICU beds despite pleas from nurses in the hospital to curtail services or divert patients to other hospitals.
“Nurses are often looking after twice as many patients as they should. They simply don’t have enough Nurses to do the job safely. They are constantly worried that patient care is being put at risk.”
The INMO’s Industrial Relations Officer Mary Rose Carroll said on Thursday: “The INMO have requested that services within the ICU are curtailed until such a time that the unit is adequately staffed.
“The hospital, in line with critical care standards, can divert patients to other ICUs in circumstances when there are inadequate and unsafe staffing levels within the unit.”
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There’s something unsettling about watching the tea turn a milky colour while the teabag is still floating in the cup.
“Still JANUARY”???? Surely Sinead you can’t have been asleep for months, it’s now AUGUST!
Remove tea bag. One sugar, stir. Add milk, stir. Bobs your uncle.
Now continue on with your lives!!
NO. Add milk before sugar, we are not savages.
My OCD gauge is starting to twitch ….
No way jim, sugar before milk otherwise it’s not hot enough to dissolve the sugar and you end up with a mess at the end of the cup.
You’re missing out on the warm lactose combining with the sugar to give a lovely caramelised smoothness. More stirring is needed of course but the good things are worth the effort. Maybe I should relax with a cuppa now.
prep tae and then add bainne of course. how hot the tae is obviously determined by amount of bainne. . bainne before tae can lead to super cooling affect which in turn could lead to melt down which could lead to all out ructions !!
Tae
a tea bag and milk have no business being in the one cup at the same time.
Tea bag in the water, let it sit for three mins, stir a few times.. Don’t squeeze the $hite out of it, tea becomes bitter. Then add a drop of milk nice and strong
I like my tea like my men, black, strong and just a little bit sweet.
Tea so black, it axed me a question.
They say breast is best?
have we gone back in time or forward in time to January! that is a shocking lazy copy and paste job!
Milk in Tea? Go way ya big girls blouse, Tea should not have milk in it!
warning: Heracy Alert! I don’t take milk in my tea!
putting sugar in tea is just wrong, and always pour the tea in first and then milk.
The perfect way to make tea…
Swirl the cup with hot water
Fill it 80% with 95 degree water
Add a tea bag for 1 min and 50secs
Remove
Add approx 5 tea spoons of room temperature fresh milk.
Toss it down the sink and pour yourself a cup of life affirming, caffeinated coffee like a normal person, sit back, drink and ponder the concept that at this moment in time everything is as close to perfect as humanly possible.
I don’t put milk in tea at all.
Black tea is nice actually! Have tried it once or twice
You put lemon into it?
No I haven’t actually! Do u?
Have put orange juice into tea and coffee lol.
From a pot, milk first.
From individual mugs, milk last.
It’s tea making, not rocket science!
It is! I know a guy who had to study quantum mechanics and Einsteins theory of relatively before he knew how to make a perfect cupa!
the longer you leave the teabag the stronger the tea Will get. adding milk Will stop the infusion of the teabag, that way by adding milk after you make it as weak or strong as you Want
mrs doyle this is a very milky cup of tea
I’m sorry but the only article I’m interested in reading about tea is that they have discovered a way to give it in an IV….. And also Jamaica ginger cake…….
No option for don’t drink tea?
Don’t drink tea? Tell us of this new planet you’re from
Coffeland lol.
depends how lazy I am. sometimes I drink the tea with the tea bag still in the cup. sometimes I add the milk then the tea bag then the hot water. If I was a perfectionist I would put the tea bag in the cup then add hot water, stir and squeeze out the tea bag then add the milk. It really depends on my humour. ..
this madness frightens me
Is that you mrs Doyle?
We need to get you a teamaster.It really takes the misery out of making tea.
You know how hard it is to find a tea spoon in my house! Hence everything gets thrown in together. . sometimes though ido burn my fingers when I dip the teabag in and out of the cup pinched in between my thumb and index finger.
@sonny black: Perhaps I like the misery.
Lily I don’t know what blaspheme or Devel worship you practice. But I’m calling the Garda. To ask, can they contact me the Ministry of good tea making and have you expelled from the country.
At what barometric pressure do you boil your water at, lol.
But what about green tea then lol.
I don’t take milk in tea, in my opinion it ruins it!
Why would you take out the tae bag, eh?…
This may sound really pernickety of me, but the answer to this actually depends on the colour of mug that I use. If I’ve used a black mug, I always put the milk in first. If it’s a white mug, then it’s the tea bag out first, then the drop of bainne.
Milk then tea bag. How else are you to know if it’s too strong or not. :)
Prior to the discovery of quality china clay in Britain only the upper classes could afford quality China .Mugs or cups made from lesser materials was liable to crack when hot tea was introduced.Thats why whether you add the milk first or later is still seen as an indicator of class origin
its more the fact that adding milk first stops the tea from staining the inside of the cup. i have my dustin the turkey cup 10 years now from carrolls on o connell st.not sure if it is made of porcelain
None of these options are correct.
The goal of making tea is to make an emulsion, not what most people make – a mixture.
The correct way to make a up of tea is to add the milk, then the bag and then the hot water.
This results in an emulsion.
The wrong way is to add the milk last.
This will result in a mixture.
You can taste the difference.
Guy Martin explains it here:
https://youtu.be/a0845Vgy99E?t=1m3s
It’s all to do with the molecular interaction between the hot water and the milk.
Got it?
What about adding the milk before the water or the tea, Guy Martin style. It’s the emulsion way of making tea, try it and you won’t ever go back.
Add the milk before the hot water and the tea bag.
That’s just crazy talk
Fascinating poll
Put simply….you don’t.
I leave the tea bag in cos the tea gets stronger the nearer you get to the bottom
Needs another option, mild first, then drop tea bag in, 30 sec add water. Remove tea bag.
ALL WRONG. Brown sauce would batter milk any day
half tea half milk, after removing tea bag
I leave my tea bag in until I finish the cup
Milk increases the viscosity and would prevent effective convection through the teabag. I’m not quite sure about the effect on dissolution of sugar crystals though.
I don’t put milk in tea or coffee
With coffee you can heat the milk with the coffee in it and put it in the microwave, can you make tea with hot milk instead of water, just a thought, lol.
Milk in coffee?
What fresh hell is this?
No water just milk used to make coffee…
Only way is to do it, add sugar and tea bag, then add the milk, mix briefly to dissolve sugar, finally the boiling water. Makes for a smoother brew!
have your say