“Nurses can’t get to everyone and deliver the standard of care which should be delivered.”
FAILURE to increase nursing staff at the Mid West Regional Hospital Accident and Emergency Department will see admissions being prioritised.
This is the position of members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation and SIPTU who yesterday staged a four-hour stoppage to draw attention to the current moratorium on nurse recruitment.
On Wednesday afternoon nurses downed tools in the A & E Department to highlight what they say is a potentially lethal overcrowding situation in the department and they say they will repeat the protest unless the moratorium on nurse recruitment be lifted and that a system of prioritising admissions be put in place to relieve overcrowding in A and E.
“This is all about safety at the hospital. This is physically a small department and having 20 to 30 patients waiting to be seen is extremely unsafe. Nurses are very concerned about the standard of care because of the number of nurses to patient ratio;” said INMO spokeswoman, Mary Fogarty.
Ms Fogarty told the Limerick Post that if there is no possibility of extra nurses being employed “then the hospital will have to prioritise admissions of people from A and E.
Asked whether the overcrowding has reached such a crisis point that patients’ lives are at risk, she said that is “a possibility.
“There have been incidents which have caused great concern. – because of the numbers, nurses can’t get to everyone and deliver the standard of care which should be delivered.”
Insisting that “no useful purpose” could be served by the stoppage, the HSE contend that it would “exacerbate the problems which the nurses are complaining of at A and E.
Management at the hospital said they had encountered “an extraordinary lack of co-operation in normal contingency planning for the stoppage which represented a new, unwelcome and potentially dangerous departure in industrial action by nursing unions”.
They describe the level of cover – four nurses working and seven on standby as “inadequate and unacceptable.
“In a situation where extra funding is not, and will not be, available from the government, it would make better sense to sit down and see how we can best utilise the resources we have,” said HSE Mid West area manager, Bernard Gloster.
