The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation has said that limiting recruitment caps enforced by the Health Service Executive will put patient safety at risk.
The decision by the Health Service Executive to put extremely limiting caps on the number of nurses, midwives and other healthcare professionals that can be recruited into the public system at both community and hospital levels will impact on the ability to provide safe care to patients.
There have been vacancies across all community settings and in wards in each hospital since the recruitment freeze was imposed last November. The INMO conservatively estimates that there are over 2,000 nursing vacancies alone. When you couple this with the fact that over 3,500 new hospital beds are due to come on stream across the country, it is hard to see how these beds can be opened safely.
The only way to ensure safe staffing is a given is to pass and enact the Patient Safety (Licensing) Bill in order to give HIQA more powers. This landmark piece of legislation gives HIQA the powers to ensure its recommendations are being enacted by individual hospitals and healthcare settings it inspects.
The INMO will be meeting the HSE tomorrow morning where we will be setting out the need to ensure that patient safety is at the centre of the lifting of the recruitment moratorium. Our members want to provide safe care in a timely manner, they cannot do that if they are working in a system that is always playing catch up on itself due to self-imposed recruitment controls.