Aontú TD for Mayo, Paul Lawless, has expressed his “deep concern” that the refusal to grant contracts or permanent jobs to newly qualified nurses in the west of Ireland could compromise patient care.
Speaking today, Deputy Lawless said: “I am very very concerned about what appears to be happening in University Hospital Galway where about seventy nurses who studied hard and worked hard to achieve a qualification have been led down the garden path when it comes to job prospects. I have been contacted by many nurses who’ve told me that not only have they been led to believe throughout their studies that there would be a job there for them at the end of it, but in many cases were actually offered jobs in specific wards in the hospital, only for this offer to be reneged upon and them to be refused a contract. I’m told the number of nurses in this situation could be anywhere between 60 and 70”.
Deputy Lawless continued: “This seems to be a return of the recruitment freeze without being labelled as such. We are approaching budget time, and again the talk of the place is the budget overspend by the HSE and the need to tighten up spending. The HSE is admin and management-heavy and that is the black hole into which the money is going – it should be going to frontline staff and services”
“The system as it stands is deeply unfair and discriminatory. Irish-qualified nurses are being left in limbo and almost expected to emigrate while the red carpet is rolled out for foreign-qualified nurses. We know that the majority of nurses working in Irish hospitals are foreign-qualified. Our hospitals are chronically understaffed, and a further pause on the recruitment of nurses will result in a compromise to patient care. I’m aware of cases where student nurses have been the backbone of the system – effectively running hospital wards by themselves holding the whole together only to be told at the end of it all when they achieve their qualification ‘thank you for your service and goodbye’. There is a deep irony here in that a recruitment freeze, or a refusal to issue contracts to new graduates is going to make the economic situation worse because the gaps will have to be filled by temporary agency nurses at a higher cost to the HSE”
“The HSE’s tendency to recruit foreign nurses ahead of Irish nurses seems to be because the recruitment process is easier and because the foreign nurses have more years’ experience. But I can tell you that there is nobody as qualified as Irish graduates who have been trained in some of the most stressful and challenging working environments across Europe – Irish emergency departments. If this were a private company making students effectively work for free and dangling job prospects in front of them and then withdrawing them abruptly the matter would be before the courts and the workplace relations commission. This is hugely discriminatory and what we see here is the widespread exploitation of Irish students and graduates. We in Aontú are calling on the Minister to urgently intervene here”, concluded Lawless.
