Nurses Thread descending into a Stamp Duty debate

Heinrich

The other 15 page thread has gone seriously off topic. This article, written by someone more involved in the issue, seems to throw more light than the ill informed...


Link

HSE are the real villains of the piece

DURING the past week we have been treated to the sorry spectacle of a powerful, relatively well-paid vested interest group of health care professionals abandoning those cherished values of compassion kindness and understanding which many citizens previously and naively assumed had motivated their professional actions.

In the process, they endangered the lives of thousands of patients.

Who are these miscreants? Is it the working-to-rule nurses? It must be the evil consultants? It is in fact neither, it is the Health Service Executive who announced last week that hospitals which run out of money before budgetary year-end would no longer receive financial rescue packages from the HSE, but would be left dangling.

Those hospitals will in turn be expected to resort to their traditional, tried-and-true cost-containment strategy, ie end-of year ward and theatre closures. Activity and costs will go down, waiting lists will go up.

Provided that health service fatigue doesn't affect the national commentariat, next year's Prime Time specials will feature the plights of more public patients dying of cancer and other diseases while they are waiting for treatments that should be routinely and expeditiously available to thecitizens of a rich modern western European country.

It is nothing short of nauseating then to hear this self-same organisation, which routinely makes decisions to deny and limit treatments, which covers up its own incompetence, which funnels public money that should be spent on health care, to rotating-door, politically-connected public relations (ie spin-doctoring) and management-consultancy (ie influence-peddling) industries, pontificating about the morality of the desperate last-ditch industrial action which is being undertaken with great reluctance, and following six months' notice, by the hardest-working, poorest-paid and least-influential professional constituency within our health care sector - the nurses.

Similarly, the charges of "dereliction of duty" and of "holding the country to ransom", which are now levelled against the nurses on a daily basis by a cabal of highly paid, totally unqualified commentators (who are in turn being fed a diet of disinformation by spin doctors, fat-cat employers' bodies, and rival unions), will ring hollow to those of us who work in the health service, and who understand the catastrophes we will soon face if we don't bring about a fundamental change - no a revolution - in the standing of the nursingprofession.

While they undoubtedly feel personally aggrieved by the low relative esteem that our society (which pays them a similar hourly wage to that given to casual garden workers, or to teenage babysitters) obviously has for them, the significance of the current dispute goes way beyond the hurt feelings or mounting overdrafts of current nurses.

It is instead about the very future of the health service itself. Simply put, one of the greatest threats to quality health care is the ongoing nursing shortage, a shortage which exists because society has decided to pay nurses so poorly.

The health service would probably manage to survive for a century or two without the spin doctors and administrators, and would limp along for a few days without doctors. It would however, come grinding to a halt in a millisecond without nurses. Yet, the poor working conditions of nurses are causing a desperate shortage, especially in the specialist grades.

For example, the administration of cancer drugs is performed by highly trained specialist oncology nurses. Several years ago, our local managers informed us that the shortage of oncology nurses (an ongoing festering wound which regularly results in patients having one or two-month delays in accessing treatment) had reached such an acute stage that one nurse taking a sick day would result in unit closure. When I suggested paying nurses more to attract more staff, I was told that we were bound by national agreements.

I have attended many "going away" social functions for nursing colleagues who were leaving our unit for pastures greener. On more than one occasion, these same nurses were back at work in our self-same unit the next day. This didn't represent a sudden change of heart. No, they were now making more money by coming back as agency nurses contracted by the hospital to do the same job that they were previously doing in the hospital's employ.

The employers' bodies accuse the nurses of attempting to subvert benchmarking, national-wage stability and the economy itself. There is, however, an essential difference between the position of the nurses and that of other benchmarked workers.

We do not have a shortage of people who wish to become gardai, or firemen or power-station workers. When we do, we will have to pay them more. We do have a shortage of nurses. The closesthistorical precedent for thecurrent crisis is the Irish Ferries dispute of 2005.

Irish Ferries decided to make its Irish work-force redundant, in order to employ staff from poor foreign countries, at what would, by Irish standards, be considered barely subsistence wages. Such was the poverty that these workers had experienced at home that the Irish Shipping pittance seemed like manna from heaven.

The desperate shortage of nurses in Ireland, a shortage which is entirely due to exploitative conditions and poor compensation, is being patched over by the recruitment of good nurses from developing countries. Like Irish Ferries, these hard-working, dedicated non-national nurses are willing to work their fingers to the bone for poor Irish wages, often scrimping and scraping to support family members back home.

It now appears that as far as the nurses are concerned, the Government and its HSE are now competing in the same "race to the bottom" that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern famously accused Irish Ferries of conducting.

Let's hope that the nurses, the true victims of this race to thebottom, manage to give Harney's Barmy Army in the HSE a kick in theirs.

John Crown is a consultant oncologist

AdMMM

I don't really get why this warranted it's own thread....

nesf

There was no need to create a new thread. Re-post that in the other thread if you wish.

Locked.

Actually, don't repost that. Link to it only and maybe provide a quick summary in your post. Copying a full newspaper article is troublesome from a copyright point of view.