Nurse Recruitment - National Joke

nursextreme

Just to Clarify: The Opening post relates to Psychiatric and Intellectual Disability Nursing disciplines. There was no National recruitment for General Nursing that I know of.

My original point is that there are numerous Psych and a few ID qualified with the last three years nurses working full time through agency that had interviews and got places on Panels but no jobs have been offered to these individuals apart from in the HSE East apparently.

Thanks for all the comments so far!!!!!!!!

Welease

nursextreme wrote: »

Would you like to break that news to the four years of Psych Nurses and ID nurses currently in training? What do you propose I do now I am a specifically trained Psych Nurse? Become a care assistant with an RGN as my boss.

Retrain or Look for work abroad or Wait until the situation changes... You have the same options open to everyone who is unemployed.. most of the choices suck, but thats the harsh reality of the economic situation.

We have 10's of thousands of construction workers in a similar position, we are not in a position to start building more empty housing estates just to get them employed either.

Wishbone Ash

tinner777 wrote: »

Agency rates are much higher, they use to be crazy money, which covered you for work and holidays etc.

IIRC they are paid at the 4th point of the scale. Therefore a nurse with 30 years experience, who may be an assistant director, is paid the same on agency as a new staff nurse.

nursextreme wrote: »

many of these still work weekends and get premium pay where they could do their work on non premium hours.

You are indeed correct but many of these nurses wouldn't have agreed to go into administration if they were required to work 'office hours'. If you were happy enough working shifts over 7 days and were then requested to do Monday to Friday resulting in a 40% pay cut, would you do it?

tinner777

what nurses are you talking about in admin?

irishh_bob

tinner777 wrote: »

Yes, but i have already stated you cannot compare us due to the different systems they all have in place. I might be out of line here but you seem to think that nurses are hanging around wards doing nothing, thats just not true. In mental health, the uk, have specialized community teams keeping people out of hospital, less inpatient acute beds, less overall nurses, we do not have them and are in no rush to develop them. We work within the system the doctors, government and unions want to maintain. The work is there for all of those 15.5 nurses per 1000, there's no way around it apart from changing the system. However changing said system costs money initially, the mentally ill in this country are being screwed from all sides. The total percent of the health budget spent has gone down from 9% to 5.4%, the only treatments available are hospitalization, never mind I digress

The ops original point is a totally valid one and my first post is what should be making you angry, I am, my place is work is run on overtime. We pay to train nurses, we pay!!!

I could no more go and work on a general ward than i could fly a plane, its a totally different job. I would have no use of a general trained nurse, if retrained they'd only be at the same level as a graduate anyway but be on the top increment of pay.

Back on point, who decided that it would be a good idea to pay for management to spend a week in Dublin, pay for their hotels and flights, from all over the country? That if you wanted a job in cork you would have to travel to dublin and be interviewed by the management in cork.

perhaps you would list the ways in which the mentlally unwell are being screwed , its a subject close to my heart as i have a relative who has serious mental health problems , his familys biggest problem has been trying to have him committed , our system is very liberal regarding the mentally unwell and you more or less have to kill someone before you are locked up , care in the community is the main mantra , beit from social workers or psychiatricsts ,IMO , those who suffer most are the familys of those who are not the full schilling

nursextreme

Welease wrote: »

Retrain or Look for work abroad or Wait until the situation changes... You have the same options open to everyone who is unemployed.. most of the choices suck, but thats the harsh reality of the economic situation.

We have 10's of thousands of construction workers in a similar position, we are not in a position to start building more empty housing estates just to get them employed either.

That's a completely different situation, supply outweighed demand in construction.Fueled by greed! In Psychiatric nursing the demand remains and is fueled unemployment and economic situation. Now we have less front line staff to deal with matters.

Wishbone Ash

irishh_bob wrote: »

perhaps you would list the ways in which the mentlally unwell are being screwed , its a subject close to my heart as i have a relative who has serious mental health problems , his familys biggest problem has been trying to have him committed , our system is very liberal regarding the mentally unwell and you more or less have to kill someone before you are locked up ,IMO , those who suffer most are the familys of those who are not the full schilling

Unfortunately though, for many years, it was the other way around. Our psychiatric services have many elderly institutionalised patients who should have never been committed but were done so by their families for very spurious reasons when it was easy to do so.

tinner777

irishh_bob wrote: »

perhaps you would list the ways in which the mentlally unwell are being screwed , its a subject close to my heart as i have a relative who has serious mental health problems , his familys biggest problem has been trying to have him committed , our system is very liberal regarding the mentally unwell and you more or less have to kill someone before you are locked up , care in the community is the main mantra , beit from social workers or psychiatricsts ,IMO , those who suffer most are the familys of those who are not the full schilling

sorry to hear about your relative. Obviously i cant comment on your relative. You should be able to get your relative assessed under the mental health act at any time. Where do you want me to start the new mental health act? Money wasted from top to bottom, new buildings for meetings, massive fees for solicitors and psychiatrists popping into units to assess someone for ten mins.

Here in cork, you get banged up in hospital for a few weeks regardless of illness and then your thrown out without any support, maybe a cpn will pop in if your lucky enough to be added to their list of 200 other clients.

Families get no support, so the second someone shows any warning signs of getting unwell people are ferried back to hospital only to be told that they are not unwell enough to need hospital but your consultant might see you next week if they've time after seeing fifty other poor soles.

Guards pick up someone pissed up, violent, instead of them spending the night in the cells, they drop them off in our place for assessment, so whilst we spend a week detoxing them, anyone needing that bed is turned away. Last week some lad whilst pissed up punched the mirror in a pub toilet after utd got beat, 4 days in our place, you couldn't make it up.


Anyone involved in psych services would totally agree that the illness effects everyone in the family I'm just sorry that currently the system in place doesn't allow for the full holistic support.

There are no rehab facilities, there are currently four people in my ward that will be there for the rest of their lives, the youngest of them is 51 years old. We have to take all patients of all ages, recently had a 14 year old girl and a 85 year old man, stuck in the middle of thirty other mentally ill patients. That's just not right.

Wishbone Ash

tinner777 wrote: »

Where do you want me to start the new mental health act? Money wasted from top to bottom, new buildings for meetings, massive fees for solicitors and psychiatrists popping into units to assess someone for ten mins

No forgetting of course that, under the new act, any patient who sleeps in a locked roon, must have a 'special' nurse outside (in addition to the normal compliment). And people complain about overtime in psychiatric hospitals? How else could such ad hoc arrangements be covered?

nursextreme

Wishbone Ash wrote: »

No forgetting of course that, under the new act, any patient who sleeps in a locked roon, must have a 'special' nurse outside (in addition to the normal compliment). And people complain about overtime in psychiatric hospitals? How else could such ad hoc arrangements be covered?

I do a good few specials and have yet to see a patient in a locked room, specials are used for patients who are a risk to themselves, others or when they are children cared for in the adult unit because we don't have child facilities. The other scenario for a special is when a psychiatric patient is treated in the general hospital for medical reasons and is a potential management problem which RGNs are not trained for.

Jane5

Nursing isn't fecking fruit picking. Why can't the HSE understand this? There isn't a seasonal need. Well staffed hospitals with permanent staff who are very familiar with the institution, the procedures in place, and the area in general are what is needed. Anything less poses, in my opinion, a danger to patients.

Workforce requirements should be able to be anticipated better than this, and agency nurses should only be used for cases of mat leave, sick leave etc.

In addition, nursing, like medicine, like most highly skilled jobs, requires ongoing experience. This is not obtained by working haphazard shifts as an agency worker or on multiple short term temporary contracts, where by the time you settle in and become familiar with the way somewhere works, the patients, and the doctors it is time to pick up and go again.

The hospitals Down Under where I used to work had a nursing "pool". This was made up of nurses that were permanently employed by the hospital, but came in every day, or night and were sent to work on whichever ward was down a person, or extra busy, or whatever. This ensured that they never used agency staff which were unfamiliar with the hospital, the patients and the procedures, instead, they used nurses who were intimate with the hospital, often knowing more about the various departments than the nurses who stayed on one ward, and were also not paid agency rates, which left the hospital in a better financial position.

tinner777

Jane5 wrote: »

Nursing isn't fecking fruit picking. Why can't the HSE understand this? There isn't a seasonal need. Well staffed hospitals with permanent staff who are very familiar with the institution, the procedures in place, and the area in general are what is needed. Anything less poses, in my opinion, a danger to patients.

Workforce requirements should be able to be anticipated better than this, and agency nurses should only be used for cases of mat leave, sick leave etc.

In addition, nursing, like medicine, like most highly skilled jobs, requires ongoing experience. This is not obtained by working haphazard shifts as an agency worker or on multiple short term temporary contracts, where by the time you settle in and become familiar with the way somewhere works, the patients, and the doctors it is time to pick up and go again.

The hospitals Down Under where I used to work had a nursing "pool". This was made up of nurses that were permanently employed by the hospital, but came in every day, or night and were sent to work on whichever ward was down a person, or extra busy, or whatever. This ensured that they never used agency staff which were unfamiliar with the hospital, the patients and the procedures, instead, they used nurses who were intimate with the hospital, often knowing more about the various departments than the nurses who stayed on one ward, and were also not paid agency rates, which left the hospital in a better financial position.

Great post

irishh_bob

Wishbone Ash wrote: »

Unfortunately though, for many years, it was the other way around. Our psychiatric services have many elderly institutionalised patients who should have never been committed but were done so by their families for very spurious reasons when it was easy to do so.

agreed , thier was time when people were put in the big house for merley being slightly odd but the pendelum has completley swung the other way now , the rights of the person who is not right completley over ride every other consideration including the wellbeing of the unwell persons family and the broader public , thier have been many people murdered over the years due to the fact that pre-emptive action was not taken against what were complete nutters , brendan o donnell was notorious in his area ( my mum is from that part of the country ) long before he became a tripple murderer , a young man from the midlands was hacked to death a few years ago , having been in the capital for a weekend at his cousins stag party , on returning back to his cousins appartment late one saturday night , he was attacked by a knife wielding maniac , when arrested , the guy claimed he had just killed the devil

i have a cousin who is convinced jesus is coming next wednesday , accused his elderly neighbour of having satan inside her and who claims he sees st peter on a regular basis , his mother with the help of the parish GP have attempted to have him admitted to the local psychiatric hospital but the ruling psychiatricst has vetoed every attempt , claiming that his problem is not psychiatric but aquired brain injury , engaging in semantics , fudge and buck passing are the name of the game when it comes to dealing with lunatics in our health service and PC liberalism is the dominant ethos

Wishbone Ash

Jane5 wrote: »

agency nurses should only be used for cases of mat leave, sick leave etc

Under the current HSE regulations, Maternity Leave cannot be covered with replacement staff and only sick leave which exceeds 28 days can be covered.

nursextreme

tinner777 wrote: »

Great post

Agreed it takes someone who experiences the situation to really understand the current state of affairs.

Piriz

hi everyone,
i don't wish to derail this thread but if anyone would like to PM me about current and or future employment statuses and forecasts for occupational therapists in Ireland and even abroad, i'd greatly appreciate any information or experiences on this, thanks.

nursextreme

murphaph wrote: »

Obviously redeployment is the key. We ARE over nursed compared to the UK (app. 10 practicing nurses per 1000 pop, Ireland 15.50 nurses per 1000 pop.) so we need to move nurses from areas of oversupply to underresourced areas, bringing their experience with them...better than sticking fresh grads in surely, for the patients anyway.

Where are all the areas that are oversupplied with Nurses, as far as I can see it front-line nursing is stretched - if we had no students we'd be rightly screwed - at this stage inexperienced staff are better than no staff.

nursextreme

tinner777 wrote: »

The interviews were supposed to be for permanent contracts and most people applying, i presume, would be on temporary lists, so would be on 40 day contracts anyway.

Of the 50 or so people interviewed from my Region "Limerick Mental Health" Maybe 4 had temporary contracts, 15 were unqualified final year students the remaining 30 were working either full time agency or part time agency or not at all. No one has got an offer of any kind yet to date.

murphaph

nursextreme wrote: »

Would you like to break that news to the four years of Psych Nurses and ID nurses currently in training? What do you propose I do now I am a specifically trained Psych Nurse? Become a care assistant with an RGN as my boss.

Sorry, but that's not a reason to hire you.

Lots and lots and lots of grads (who have also been educated at the taxpayers' expense) in all sorts of disciplines will leave college with no job top walk into.

I would rather see nurses redeployed from other areas (after adequate retraining) than just hiring more grad nurses into a public sector which is already costing way more than we can afford. We have to cut our cloth to suit our measure.

murphaph

nursextreme wrote: »

Where are all the areas that are oversupplied with Nurses, as far as I can see it front-line nursing is stretched - if we had no students we'd be rightly screwed - at this stage inexperienced staff are better than no staff.

We have statistically 50% more practicing nurses per capita than the UK. If these nurses are being tied up in admin roles (one of the reasons given by nurses on this thread for "skewing" the figures) then the thing to do is redeploy admin staff from overstaffed departments in the HSE into these roles and free up these nurses to nurse. The solution is NOT to just hire more staff into an already overstaffed HSE.

Dr Galen

the factors behind why we have more nurses per capita are varied tbh. An over reliance on acute care, and under reliance on primary care being one, and probably the most relevant. We also have a totally inadequate system for delegating tasks and responsibilities to other healthcare workers. This is the same problem for doctors, where we have docs doing jobs that nurse are well able to take on and do. We also need to take into account the types of hospitals we have in this country and the geographical spread of the facilities. We have lots of small, local hospitals compared with say the UK or France, who have less of these and more of the "centre of excellence " type facilities. Scales of economy and all that.

Your point regarding re-training of nurses is only somewhat valid really. The only thing a psych nurse, and ID (or whatever they are called these days ) and a general nurse have in common is the title nurse at the end of their job title. The roles, responsibilities and duties of each strand of nursing have been diverging for years, and thats not just here but across the world. The engineering analogy is a decent one, but doesn't really go far enough tbh. They are very distinct jobs with very distinct ways of working. Making it easier for people to transfer from one to another would be a good idea though, as I know people who woud want to do this. It would not be a solution to the core issue though.

nursextreme

murphaph wrote: »

Sorry, but that's not a reason to hire you.

Lots and lots and lots of grads (who have also been educated at the taxpayers' expense) in all sorts of disciplines will leave college with no job top walk into.

"Those damn greedy students over the last few year have a lot to answer for, ruining our economy and with their massive student loans, which they used to speculate on property portfolios and development land."

We should stop educating altogether, that would save the Taxpayer a fortune!

sceptre

nursextreme wrote: »

"Those damn greedy students over the last few year have a lot to answer for, ruining our economy and with their massive student loans, which they used to speculate on property portfolios and development land."

We should stop educating altogether, that would save the Taxpayer a fortune!

Missing the point I'm afraid. Neither an education nor a qualification entitle anyone to a job. Of any sort. They tend to make it more likely that someone can get a job in a particular field and perhaps at a particular level (and both of those are good things) but that's all. That's unfortunate but that's reality.

nursextreme

sceptre wrote: »

Missing the point I'm afraid. Neither an education nor a qualification entitle anyone to a job. Of any sort. They tend to make it more likely that someone can get a job in a particular field and perhaps at a particular level (and both of those are good things) but that's all. That's unfortunate but that's reality.

If you go back to my OP the point I am making is that: both time and money were wasted with the National Recruitment Drive.
Apparently we are over run with nurses anyway.

I do not believe qualification entitles anyone to a job.

I currently have a job - working in the area that I trained, earning 50% more than I should be getting for that job.

I didn't set out to do Mental Health Nursing for the money, I would rather earn less money and have a job where I can use my training in a more efficient way as opposed to working in a mercenary type role where I am limited to what I can do because I am only an agency nurse.

I cant believe that people think this whole recruitment issue is a Black or White issue.

murphaph

nursextreme wrote: »

If you go back to my OP the point I am making is that: both time and money were wasted with the National Recruitment Drive.
Apparently we are over run with nurses anyway.

I do not believe qualification entitles anyone to a job.

I currently have a job - working in the area that I trained, earning 50% more than I should be getting for that job.

I didn't set out to do Mental Health Nursing for the money, I would rather earn less money and have a job where I can use my training in a more efficient way as opposed to working in a mercenary type role where I am limited to what I can do because I am only an agency nurse.

I cant believe that people think this whole recruitment issue is a Black or White issue.

We don't, but those of us outside the HSE can see it's a mess that needs top down reform. This means pain in the short to medium to term to deliver a quality, integrated sytstem (where the left hand knows what the right hand is doing) in the longer term. We MUST stop the firefighting approach (ie, hiring people without looking at what other people are actually doing). McCarthy said the HSE has app. 6000 staff that could be let go if redeployment was in place. These 6000 staff (presumably mostly in admin and management roles) are sucking money out of the system (as are the generally inflated wages when compared to the UK etc.) and if they could be removed then there would be funds freed up to hire, retrain whatever the right nurse for the right departments.

I fear however that the HSE is unreformable. These 6000 wasters in there hide behind their unions which all HSE staff pay for. The good HSE staff financially defend the wasters and prevent the reform they probably want to see themselves.

L00045934

Its a complete mess. I done my interview and picked a specific area that I would like to work in as my preference. I picked this area as I was currently working in the hospital there and have now been working there for 10 months. I recently found out that this hospital (the panel) has been removed from the area as it is a different type of nursing. It was offered to a completely different set of people even though I was on the panel for this hospital. In the mean time, I got offered permanency in a different hospital and was advised to take it and so I have. Very confusing and disappointed.

nursextreme

I can believe it. I got expression of interest offers for 38 positions in the Dublin area, a region i never applied to work in on the panel. Some where even in the ID sector. Of course not a bean down here where 30 of us are working agency and costing the Service a fortune. I have expressed an interest in the dublin positions because I dont know what the future has in store, no firm offers though.
If the panel was working by its crazy rules, I would gather that Everyone on the panels in Dublin turned down these 38 positions - somehow I don't think so. I just more inefficient pen pushers calling the shot, and making up the rules as they go along - typical of the HSE structure as a whole. :mad:

L00045934

I was offered an expression of interest in March for the place I'm working in. I was out by three positions on the panel. HSE decide that this hospital should be recruited differently because its different nursing and I don't get offered. It was offered to the national panel. I got offered a different place in the recent expressions of interest. I feel totally shafted! I realllllly don't want to leave where I'm working. I love it so much.

tinner777

i don't know if you got a job nurse extreme but things in my place are about to collapse. We haven't been allowed to replace anyone, give temp contracts or use agency for six months. Last week we had three nurses instead of seven. A couple of nights ago we couldn't special a young suicidal man as we did not have the staff. During the summer we had to ask forth year students to cover and paid them with time due. The level of care being given is plummeting as nurses spend their day between different specials as there's no cover. Old fellas being left in bed as we've no time to get them up before breakfast. I've never been so concerned working on a mental health unit, i actually dread going to work these days, i hate being in charge when i dont feel safe. God knows how the patients must feel.

nursextreme

tinner777 wrote: »

i don't know if you got a job nurse extreme but things in my place are about to collapse. We haven't been allowed to replace anyone, give temp contracts or use agency for six months. Last week we had three nurses instead of seven. A couple of nights ago we couldn't special a young suicidal man as we did not have the staff. During the summer we had to ask forth year students to cover and paid them with time due. The level of care being given is plummeting as nurses spend their day between different specials as there's no cover. Old fellas being left in bed as we've no time to get them up before breakfast. I've never been so concerned working on a mental health unit, i actually dread going to work these days, i hate being in charge when i dont feel safe. God knows how the patients must feel.

The standards are dropping all round, people dont see this untill its their relative that is left without care - things are going to get worse. Still hanging on to agency here, 90% of the staff compliment in the Acute unit some days. Still not a single contract in nearly 3 years now.