Protests are rising against the HSE policy of re-employing health workers without allowing the required self-isolation

DUBLIN: Protests are growing against the HSE policy of re-employing health care staff who have been in close contact with COVID-19 positive patients without allowing the required quarantine.

One of the 12 COVID patients in Ireland is still a nurse or midwife. In this situation too, there is no intervention from the government or HSE to address the concerns of the health sector by deploying more staff.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the HSE has not yet approved the need to increase recruitment in the health sector in Ireland.

The HSE said it had hired 1,600 additional nurses since May, but 1,300 of them were not fully qualified nurses. The INMO points out that they are students who have entered the job on a temporary basis. In fact, the union claims that since December 2019, only about 240 additional staff nurses and midwives have been hired. It is in this context that the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organization (INMO) calls for the repeal of this policy, which denigrates all health workers.

The Annual Meeting of the INMO adopted an urgent resolution calling for the implementation of a number of measures to enhance employee safety and efficiency in the event of a public health crisis. The resolution called for the repeal of the controversial contempt policy that exempted quarantine for health workers. The urgent resolution calls for additional recruitment funding and the mandatory weekly COVID-19 inspection of all staff in community health care services and the reinstatement of the recruitment authority of the directors of nursing and midwifery.

The resolution called on the INMO Executive Council to reconvene members six weeks later to determine further progress on the union’s needs.

‘The message from our members is clear. Frontline nurses and midwives simply do not have enough staff to do the job safely, INMO General Secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said.

‘If we want to provide safe care and protect staff, we simply need to increase staffing. Our unpaid student nurses are being relied on to fill vacancies and this is not acceptable,’ Ní Sheaghdha stated.

She also reminded that there are not enough employees and COVID will have a big crisis in winter. ‘That means giving managers the power to hire, ending the derogations policy which risks infecting more staff, increasing staff testing, and funding a proper staffing plan,’ Ms. Ní Sheaghdha added.

Nursing and midwifery are team professions. The safety of patients and staff could be compromised if there are not enough staff, said Martina Harkin-Kelly, outgoing President of the INMO. It is time for Health Minister Stephen Donnelly to act on these legitimate concerns.

Frontline members make only the simplest of demands to ensure adequate security by providing adequate staff. There is no need to beg for it, she said.