Safe staffing needed in our hospitals
After meeting nurses on the picket line in University Hospital Limerick, the country’s most consistently overcrowded hospital, Labour Party Health spokesperson, Alan Kelly TD, has called on the Government to take the concerns nurses have seriously.
Deputy Kelly said:
“The nurses I met outside University Hospital Limerick this morning don’t want to be on strike but they feel like their concerns around safe staffing have been completely ignored by the Government.
“It’s not easy being on strike, especially at this time of year.
“There are real ways that this dispute can be solved and we believe it can be done within the framework of the PSSA.
“Two weeks ago, the Dáil passed measures proposed by Labour, Sinn Fein, Independents4Change and the Social Democrats that called on the government to commission a review into the nursing profession that properly lays out the scale of extra work and duties that nurses carryout and how nurses could be compensated for this.
“The Labour Party is disappointed at the failure of Fine Gael Ministers to seriously engage with the concerns of the INMO and the obvious problems of recruitment and retention of nurses and midwives in our health service.
“The INMO are crying out for safe staffing in our hospitals and this can only be done with addressing the root causes of nurses leaving the profession here to go abroad to better pay and conditions.
“The time for has come for some flexibility on the part of the government and the Dáil has called on the government to bring imaginative solutions to the table these must be carried out.”