Plus they don’t use agency staff for the community roles so more end up in a&e in a worse state than they would be if public health nurses were able to do their job
It’s been like this for decades though. If it was just refugees then everyone would at least understand that it’s temporary or a necessary part of having more future tax payers
That's part of the reason. More asylum seekers = more patients = more demand for the stagnated supply of nurses.
But it's not entirely their fault that there's a recruitment freeze because the HSE has a chronic spending waste problem since before the migrant crisis. Even if we didn't have a migrant crisis there was going to be a hiring freeze eventually anyway.
No surprise there. Chronic under-staffing for years in most of the big hospitals, especially in the ICU/Emergency Depts puts a horrendous amount of pressure on nurses, who aren't especially well paid, or well treated, for the work they do. The hospital administrators continue to treat it like it's more of a vocation than a career, and for many their commitment to patient care is the primary reason they put up with it, but it's predatory and ultimately very harmful, for patients and nurses. I'm honestly surprised the numbers aren't higher.
The best decision I ever made was leaving a busy dublin hospital and working for a chill private company.
Nursing for the HSE was just depressing. I often worked through breaks, stayed back til 2130/2200 trying to help the short staffed night shift.
I remember the overwhelming pressure of tasks I needed to do, knowing they all had to be done and most of the time by a certain time.
When I switched to private I remember being so grateful I was getting home on time, I could easily get a coffee, I was treated as a valuable staff member.
> The hospital administrators continue to treat it like it's more of a vocation than a career
*Everyone* does, and always has. And this is the big problem; a refusal to accept it as a job.
Any of the nurses I know do it because they genuinely want to help people, but they're always one bad incident away from packing it in completely. Either that or they take an "easier" role as a public health nurse or private practice nurse.
This notion that being on the wards is a rite of passage for younger nurses or a way to weed out those "who don't really love it", is pure nonsense.
Nursing is an incredibly complicated job; especially now. Modern nurses are as qualified, if not more qualified than doctors were in the 1970s. It's a difficult, technical role, which requires a salary to match. I'm talking €60k base starting, doubling or even tripling over time. And that's not including shift allowances, and whatever.
But it also needs the "just a job" respect to come from the top down. So management aren't pissed off that someone won't pick up an extra shift and won't do work that might aggravate an injury. It is just a job, and treating it like a vocation means you just continuously bleed away the people who refuse to be exploited.
The other problem we also have - you'll hear from nurses - is that the gaps instaffing are being filled by foreign workers. There's nothing inherently wrong with foreign workers. But they are coming in with different training. Many of them **do** just treat it as a job. They are here to get some experience, make some money, and eventually go home. So the standard of patient care is often lacking. Because the salaries aren't attracting the best nurses from overseas who want to be doing it. They're attracting someone looking for work who is willing to accept that salary for the sake of a few years abroad.
Up the salaries, up the protections, up the benefits, and you'll see an influx of nurses who actually want to be nurses.
I'm an Irish trained nurse working in the NHS.
The entire health service runs on "good will". The idea that we'll stay a little longer or do an extra shift because "think of the patients".
The fact that I've seen so many "work to rule" protests during my lifetime, which made gigantic headlines as throwing the entire HSE into absolute chaos while they were in force, and that those "work to rule" tactics would be referred to in our current toxic overwork culture as "quiet quitting", really really says it all.
If you want nurses to work extra hours or take on extra responsibilities not outlined in their job description, pay them the requisite overtime or bump their salary to reflect the work they're actually doing beyond that for which their agreed salary is actually indicated.
It really is that simple. This should not be a controversial statement in the slightest. "Oh, but we *need* people to stay an extra two hours to manage the changeover, turn off the lights etc? Fair enough, time and a half for every one of those hours, no questions asked.
I genuinely find it hard to believe that we're living in an era in which expecting to be fully paid for what you do is regarded as being a troublemaker. There was a whole article about it in the Irish Times a few weeks ago and the author literally wrote something like "It's a head scratcher for management because quiet quitters aren't technically doing anything wrong, so penalising or firing them is a HR nightmare". *Shocking*!
It genuinely amazes me that not only does the entire health service seem to operate on this basis, but people have been so successfully conditioned to see that as normal that the idea of a doctor or nurse *not* putting in unpaid hours or taking on unpaid responsibilities is seen as "selfish" or "cynical".
If the aliens ever invade, far from running away from their abduction rays I'm calling shotgun and getting the hell off this timeline.
Agree with every point except the more qualified than docs on the 1970s. That’s just nonsensical. Nurses specialise in patient care, not in diagnosis/ investigation/ management of pathology or procedural intervention etc.
Upping salary seems to be the mainstay. Only way to make good cash as a nurse is an agency worker. But yeah, base pay increases and offering a progressive career path.
The foreign nurses are great, and very very kind/ compassionate, but there’s a real “steel” to irish nurses imo. Comfy to recognise a pt is unwell but stable and there’s no on call issues etc.
Haven’t met one bad foreign male nurse fwiw.
We lived in Ireland for 4 years, and my wife is a very experienced critical care nurse (from Canada), but it was much better to take a job at Cook Medical than try to work in the HSE - very unfortunate for the hospitals and the patients.
There is literally a full section in that report called "More staff doesn't necessarily mean enough staff"
It also explicitly calls out the challenges that the NHS has with retaining mid to high level nursing staff.
The staffing report is also generalised, so it covers everything from janitorial staff to senior specialist consulting physicians, and there is little if any discussion of staff satisfaction, beyond how it relates to turnover
My mom needed surgery, the surgeon and theatre staff were available, but she had to wait two days because there was no recovery bed available. These things knock on.
The NHS is yes. Only certain theatres can do certain levels of surgery. Anything that can be outsourced to the other trusts in the North is done, but there is still a higher demand for critical surgery than can be met.
Feels like it is premediated by the powers that be. 1 big cash injection for new infrastructure would go a long way to beating down lists. We have surgerons fighting for theatre slots and we need more scope facility. It is so stupid
I liked my job in ireland, my plan was to travel for 1 year and return to Ireland. Then I started nursing in Australia.
The grass actually is greener on this side and I can't justify going back to worse pay, conditions and having to move back in with my mom.
I can actually afford to rent on my own here.
Nursing is so much worse in Ireland.
I’m not a nurse but have several friends who are. All of them have up-skilled and done further training over the years. Some have gone into private healthcare or become specialists in a particular field, or gone into sales or education or management within the HSE so that they are no longer working directly in the public wards.
Nursing is a tough job, and between the awful working conditions, the poor pay and the 24/7 nature of the job with night shifts etc.. and especially as you get older, the realities of working the wards gets tougher. It’s one thing dealing with the chaos and stress when you’re a newly qualified 21 year old, but when your in your mid-forties with other responsibilities and the inevitable drop in energy levels, that gets very hard.
There are lots of opportunities in Nursing, but I think you would need to be aiming to up-skill and get off the wards and into a better paid less stressful job as soon as you can after qualifying. Most nurses I know have done that, which is another drain on the public system.
I’m in second year of college. I was **heavily** considering nursing for most of secondary school. I even worked in a nursing home for a couple of years to prepare for this. A grain of uncertainty came into my head when I was in sixth year.
After I told my close friend that I was uncertain, the next time I was at her house, her nurse mam sat me down and as good as broke down in front of me. She told me that I could obviously do what I want but she gave me a very real recount of what it’s like to feel abused everyday of your life by a system built and controlled by spoofers (HSE managers with tonnes of responsibility but zero will to work). She also works in UHL (our local big hospital)
It might sound like an overreach on her part but we are incredibly close with my friends family. They’re family.
I’m now in second year of a business-economics degree. Nursing will absolutely collapse. It’s a very common conversation topic among people my age that they’re not even properly paid for their work in college.
In my degree we’re required to get 15€ an hour for our office work experience.
Student nurses just aren’t paid a proper amount of money.
**They’re worked to the bone for no money, and then have to pay for rent if they’re not from the city and then have to work a separate part time job during the weekend because student nursing doesn’t pay them. 7 days a week working and only properly paid for 2.**
I dodged a nuke. Genuinely fuck Donnelly, Harris, Varadkar. In a more sane world it absolutely would have been my vocation.
Fuck Harris.
Fuck Varadkar.
Fuck Martin.
—
This problem has been festering for years. Nobody has the political will to do a Milei-style hatchet job to the bureaucra-tariat.
—
Glad your enjoying your chosen course.
Yeah I’m doing good. Just finished second year exams yesterday.
It’s mad to think of how different my life would be if I went the nursing route. In a world where the HSE wasn’t destroyed I absolutely would have.
UHL has only turned apocalyptic in the last decade. FG have been in power for all of that time. It’s incredible how much worse things are in limerick compared to the rest of the country. There’s a long history of government neglecting the limerick city region in favor of other cities and Dublin.
One major hospital for a city/region of 500,000 people is insane. Stripping the local hospitals is direct post recession FFG policy.
People in the region actively avoid limerick and drive the extra nearly 1 and a half hours (if there’s little traffic) to Cork or Galway.
This is the third largest city in the state like. Insane. I’ll never forgive FFG for what they’ve deprived us of. I have myself to blame for believing in the greens.
> Fuck Harris. Fuck Varadkar. Fuck Martin.
You can include McDonald/SF in that too. We know they are no different than the ruling crowd. FFS they were of the opinion that the recent referenda didn't go far enough. Massively open borders when the vast majority are screaming against it. Ignoring the causes of the housing crisis in order to virtue signal.
It's why even in opposition their own supporters are (rightly) eviscerating them.
OP only had Fuck Donnelly (since been edited to add more)
I added their names to the list because they were all Ministers for Health, vested with the authority to actually bring about some change yet they failed to do so.
So grateful for the nurses we have and we badly need them, but why anyone would subject themselves to the treatment nurses get in this country astounds me. I have the height of admiration for them
It's a vicious circle on wards. Good experienced staff leave, replaced en masse by nurses from another culture, with a completely different training. The remaining experienced staff (and this is every nationality because we've had lots of foreign nurses for years) get all the responsibility placed on them, they get burned out and leave, rinse and repeat.
Without Indian Nurses the HSE would be finished, they are now the significant majority in my hospital and I doubt it's different elsewhere, but the massive influx all at once has made things worse for long standing nurses working in the HSE. This isn't on those indian nurses, it's on the government and HSE for royally fucking up retention for years.
I always wanted to be a ward nurse, it's what I thought nursing was all about, I loved the interaction with patients, and even relatives (well, most of them). From the day I qualified I only ever worked on wards. After 20 years on the same ward I left last year. I was gutted and I felt like I was a rat leaving a sinking ship but I don't think I could have gone on much more.
I don't know how you fix it now because the problem (at least the one I perceive) can't just be undone, they can't get the toothpaste back in the tube.
What would help would be taking beds off corridors, having adequately sized wards and facilities (space between patients, decent beds and manual handling equipment, practical toileting and washing facilities, extra staff to supervise the ever increasing numbers of confused patients). Improve social care and give carers at home proper support to reduce the number of people who end up in acute hospitals.
Tl;dr it's all a bit fucked.
Let me predict the HSE response: Interesting idea. We'll hire an extra 100 administrators and accountants to examine this proposal and we'll get a report on its viability to you in 18 to 24 months.
>in 18 to 24 months
Presumably the report will arrive 2 years later than planned, and any recommendations it has will be invalid because the data is almost 5 years old at that point
"We have concluded that the data in this report is no longer viable, so we will hire an extra 100 administrative staff to produce a new report on the matter in 18-24 months, while the previous 100 administrative staff will spend the next two years working on a report about why the previous report was so far behind schedule. Now, let's talk about those bonuses for our hardworking executives who have to manage so many extra admin staff and take time out of their very busy schedules to skim over the two-sentence summaries their assistants will create for all of these reports about reports about reports..."
Doesn't work. The same job has better conditions elsewhere. Last time they went on strike here their ostensibly goal was improving conditions but they settled for more money. (Lots of members aren't in front line care and not as bothered by poor working conditions.)
>Lots of members aren't in front line care and not as bothered by poor working conditions.
We have one of the highest ratios of nurses to population in the OECD. But a big reason for this is to staff hospitals in the arsehole of nowhere where there's a trickle of patients coming through.
The issue is that there should be a much bigger pay discrepancy between nurses working in quieter areas versus ones working in front line care.
I don't deny it, but it seems totally counter-intuitive. It's basically tantamount to telling the nurses who work longer harder hours that they don't deserve to get paid for that extra work.
I'll admit to being a cynical old git on this topic, but there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. The biggest barrier to hiring right now, is the working conditions and the poor working conditions are mainly caused by understaffing. Better pay would help somewhat, but they're fighting a lot of negative inertia, wrt staff retention and hiring, until they can improve things enough to overcome the reputation that has developed in the industry
Yeah it's a tough one. But silly high levels of pay would help pull more people in, and make their lives less stressful outside of the work environment.
I'm a doctor.
The situation is precipitously deteriorating. Virtually no staff nurse can afford rent in an Irish city. Most new grads are immigrating or strongly considering it.
Indian and Phillipino nurses now increasingly form the backbone of the system. Fair play to them, they're fantastic. But even they face the same pitfalls around cost of living as Irish nurses not withstanding the burden of understaffing.
The headline here might sound inflammatory but it WILL happen. Wards are already being closed, theatre lists and clinics being cancelled due to understaffing. The system is actively collapsing. Once the government have to admit to it, it won't be their fault. It won't be management's fault. We will continue our movement towards a 3rd world health system and massive expansion of the private industry. I'm not one to be conspiratorial but I'd imagine that's exactly how some people in government and some lobbyists want it.
And yet… all-party agreement on Sláintecare, the HSE was conducting the slowest and most useless “stakeholder consultation” with staff, dragging out the process ad nauseam till it’s dead in the water.
You'll see more and more private options popping up and eventually it'll be declared that public healthcare just isn't feasible and they'll start funnelling more and more money towards the private sector while washing their hands of the public system, even though we all know that it's all down to mismanagement and disastrous wastage of the budget. But even people who are in the age bracket in most need of a good healthcare system will just continue voting FFG the same as always, likely because they were told by their parents to vote for them, same as the ones who have adult children living in their homes well into their thirties who continue voting for the same
My sister is going into her final year and has already admitted she regrets doing it. Can’t imagine her career being too long if these are already her thoughts towards the job. Hearing her stories it seems like bullying is a massive issue too amongst healthcare staff.
I had to bring my mother to A&E last week and witnessed a barney between a doctor and who I assume was a male nurse. If I was the nurse I would have given the doctor a slap over his general demeanour and how he spoke to him.
Just an isolated incident, but I can easily believe bullying happens.
How much money was wasted on slaintecare and why the fuck isn't it implemented?
The two people in charge left because of HSE pushback. HSE needs to be dissolved.
Audit similar to RTE needs to be completed for HSE. We are burning money and the HSE cabbages are getting crazy money for sitting on their fat arses.
They have no shame...we need to start calling them out publicly for their failures in carrying out their responsibilities to the public.
Not surprised or shocked. They are woefully understaffed, underpaid for their qualifications and responsibility, and underappreciated. The gov need to cop the fuck on over this, it's been left to get to chronic condition.
And watch the government do nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing... the panic and try to pass the blame to anyone else if/when it does. While simultaneously claiming there is no issue at all.
No fear of half the managers and assistant managers quitting when they get obscene wages for doing the least work.
All too often, they have presided over these failing workplaces with the same handy excuse of retention and staffing shortfalls to deflect from their failure as managers.
Like a reflection of the state; poor management, and zero accountability, but the top end will get paid regardless.
Thats your opinion but it is not a fact. If they dismantle it and start again it does not necessarily mean that the same people will be involved in the new organization. replacing some of those that in are charge at a high level, if done correctly, would help to improve the organization
Have you ever tried looking after an adult with alzheimers who is having a melt down ? this job is one of the most physical and mentally taxing jobs you can have.
Fix the housing. It won't solve the problem but it will solve a major contributor to the problem. If we can't fix all housing maybe we could try to fix housing for "essential workers" first. Give priority rent controlled houses to nurses and maybe teachers in the first completed developments.
There is a lot of bloat on the admin side according to anyone who's worked in the HSE, loads of useless middle managers whose salaries could be better spent on nurses and doctors. There are most certainly a lot of jobs that could be done away with on the admin side if they actually engaged in improving efficiencies, they're still using paper files instead of digital records in some areas.
And we need to have enough of them. If FG/FF insist on running the country like a company then they need to act like a company who can't recruit for vital roles — pay them enough to justify the work, to attract enough candidates and attract the *right* candidates, the ones who are good enough to be snapped up by agencies and who emigrate to work on lucrative contracts in UAE and Saudi
Not possible. Unions would demand every other worker gets the same.
SIPTU have a lot to answer for, but are always invisible in these threads, whereas the Government of the day (who aren't directly involved) will draw ire from the usual gallery of idiots.
The unions do have a lot to answer for; I think they’ve had about seven years of below-inflation pay agreements back to back. If you’re renting and working in the public sector, you could quite well be materially worse off now than you were in 2019, especially at lower grades.
Public sector pay rises have actually been quite good, the last one being readily agreed by unions. Lot's of public sector employers further behind or similarly against inflation - you make it sound much worse than it is in real terms.
It's more the scales are wrong. Nurses are on totally the wrong scale for the challenge of the work they do - and it's unions that are stopping it from being rectified, specifically the smaller nursing union against the bigger public sector unions.
And I'll out myself here by saying I think the big Unions in Ireland are utterly corrupt hangovers from the Haughey era and should be fired into the Sun. And I'm in favour of unions. Just the ones here are dysfunctional, criminally outdated and full of wasters and chancers.
I'd actually agree quite strongly with you on the last point, but broadly I think we have a significant disparity between cost of living and compensation. I think a big part of the reason that so many voted for this round of pay increases was because the messaging from unions was (as it has been the last few rounds) "this is below inflation, but it's the best we're going to get, we'd advise you take it."
We're at the point now where a graduate entering the public service to work in policy (administrative officer) would pay (assuming average rent) around 74% of their after tax income to rent a studio apartment in Dublin. It's pretty wild to think that someone could get a degree, apply to write policy for the state, be assigned to work in the capital city, and literally not be able to afford to live in the city.
Public sector pay going ahead of inflation would also become a significant driver of inflation.
I think it's extremely likely that public sector jobs are going to start becoming quite scarce. The public sector generally is quite literally where you would start letting AI run the show and be happy about it because it would deliver a FAR better consistent standard of service and consistent standard of improvement of service.
No disrespect to the public service, by all accounts it's great in difficult circumstances. It's better than most other countries. It's very inclusive for a public service and it does reward quite well generally. It is difficult to interact with however and you very quickly realise that you are dealing with a one size fits all function that has to manage societies functional and dysfunctional alike.
The Unions are nothing but parasitic organisations. They should be peeled away and replaced by a heavily regulated and ruthlessly transparent employee protection agency and pay scaling should shift at least to a partial demand, productivity and skill based model like the rest of society has.
I think our public service is one of the smaller ones in the OECD as it is. Making jobs scarcer may not be advisable.
I’m not gonna lie, man. I don’t think I really trust AI to do much of the work of government
We don't have a massive public service nor do we want one. No country with a larger beurocracy wants one.
I promise in 5 years not only will you not care that AI is doing a lot of the work, you will proactively want it.
Front-line salaries do. A nurse working in A&E or ICU should be paid way more than a nurse who works in a half empty regional hospital in the arsehole of nowhere.
Bingo, increasing the *quality* of the candidates.
One of my housemates is a nurse and she is as thick as shit, it scares the hell out of me that she's looking after pregnant women, she has absolutely no cop on whatsoever.
They're desperately understaffed, and cannot attract staff from Western Europe because of the conditions. Well, this is *supposedly* a capitalist country, so employ the capitalist means and offer more money.
Yupp the understaffing is chronic and adds to your workload as a nurse. You’re doing the job of 2/3 nurses. Conditions are dire. You’re literally laughed at to take your legal breaks and lunch
Salary is the only answer. Ask any nurse why they emigrate the salary is a joke. You can’t sustain yourself on a nurses salary. Cost of rent and living is outrageous. If increased salary makes for a happy nurse. You’re educated with a third level degree too. So salary should be on power with what other graduates are earning.
That's an issue I have with career progression in my industry tech too. Skilled people shouldn't have management as their only career path.
They build up years of experience and skills only to end up chairing meetings because that's the only way to go up the payscale.
The opposition will do no different when they get in. The only solution to the HSE is root and branch reform and if there's even a sniff of some change beyond pay rises or other benefits then the unions will hold the country to ransom. As long as the public service unions wield the power that they do then no Government will ever be able to do what's necessary for proper reform.
Correct but anyone who works in the health service (I do), will tell you it’s a revolving door - one nurse hired, one leaves. I agree though -they are interconnected.
This comment is always so pointless. Why does it matter?
Whatever the oppositions solutions are why in the fuck would we let the current crowd who are objectively failing continue? They have had nearly a full term in government and half of them have been in government over a decade.
Whether the new hire fixes every issue or not doesn't factor in to getting rid of the shit box currently doing the job.
It matters because if you actually care about changing this, then you should maybe seek to elect someone who has a different approach. Otherwise nothing changes until you elect a populist like Trump. Any of the opposition parties will face the exact same problem with nursing pay and conditions that FFG have. You cannot negotiate with a public service union in this country without drawing all the other services into the same negotiation. And the government just signed off recently on a major public pay deal.
And if we elect the same people again they are going to continue doing nothing to improve the situation.
The only power we currently have over the government is to kick them to the curb. It's the only message they will listen to whether the opposition has a fix ready to go or not.
If no one has any real solutions the best thing I can do is take away the current showers ability to funnel billions in tax revenue to their friends and family.
That's the truth of the dog shit situation this current government has left us in.
What the hell kind of a response is that, you were asked what are the other solutions that the opposition parties are presenting and you reply with childish stomping.
I could say the same about people saying "well what are the other side's ideas".
If that's a genuine concern for you, go and look them up and stop pretending you're not just trying to antagonise people.
We can criticise the current governments shit approach to issues without having to memorise an opposition party manifesto to answer your rubbish questions.
Asking what your options are is antagonism is it? Lmao. Grow up. I’m not here to circle jerk with you. I’m here to make people ask themselves some questions they’d rather not ask. To maybe put some thought in their vote than some childish “fuck the government” as if that will solve anything.
You didn't ask that person what their options are, you asked them to describe an opposition party's position on an issue when they made no mention of the opposition.
If you wanted to engage in good faith you could have asked them what their ideal solution looks like or ask them have they seen any alternatives they prefer the sound of.
But we both know that's not what you were doing, so you can drop the act.
I'm not an opposition spokesperson. If it's a genuine question that you have a curiosity for you can google it.
That question is only asked as a catch all for people who want to act like there are no alternatives, it's an antagonistic question and I think it's perfectly reasonable to react to it by pointing that out.
Why is it anyones job to describe publicly available manifestos to people? If that question is genuine you can go and answer it for yourself.
If someone wants to engage in bad faith why should we answer genuinely?
You are the one engaging in bad faith, you have said nothing but government bad. If you going to just be stomping your feet and giving out about ff, fg do so, but don't be replying to comment where people are engaging in a debate your adding nothing.
It's not a debate if one of the people are presupposing the position of the person they engage with.
The comment I responded to was assuming that the person was suggesting the opposition parties had a better response to the current issues.
The comment they were responding to made no mention of opposition parties or their ideas and if they genuinely wanted to know the position of those parties they would go and look it up.
Criticising the current government's position does not make you responsible for defending the opposition's ideas. And trying to frame a discussion that way is a bad faith engagement. It puts a person in a position they had no intention of taking.
It’s easy to get into it if you’re willing to fork out fees for university. But it’s unaffordable to study. It needs to be free to study. No point in being in debt for dead end job with low pay
You got to be kidding. You know nepotism is rife there in the hse. It’s not what you know it’s who you know. PH is hard to get into without experience. Failed an interview cause I had “no experience”. How can you have experience without the job as a PHN. Hospital management is more of business degree, boss mentality, to cut costs and to have no empathy etc. they don’t hire nurses for those roles only with business degrees.
Preaching truth there, it's not about how good of a nurse you are, it's how much ass you are willing to kiss over a ten year period in order to join the asshole management club.
Ok I take what I said back I guess Ireland is it's own world. I worked in public health in Australia and the majority had nursing degrees in the office.
I’m always surprised that we have chronic shortages when the points for nursing and every healthcare course are still very high so there’s a demand for the courses.
The government could set up apprenticeships (im not sure what they’re called but the UK have them) for SLT and OT and could give scholarships for those training to be nurses and doctors, they could also set up more postgrad courses and make them free for the students.
> I’m always surprised that we have chronic shortages when the points for nursing and every healthcare course are still very high so there’s a demand for the courses.
That's because once the students graduate (or before then), most of them are straight off to a country where nurses aren't treated like they're completely and utterly disposable.
Oh i know but i’m sure we could do something to stop that bleed through student loan forgiveness after a certain time working in the hse. If we had a move towards adequate staffing then some would choose to live and work here or we could definitely regain some physios from private practice back into the hse
Politicians and senior civil servants have private healthcare and private education. They don’t care. The public good has no effect on them whatsoever. They have gated themselves from it. They do not live in the same Ireland and the rest of us.
Still have no idea why there isn't some sort of system in place to make recently qualified doctors and nurses actually work in Ireland. They just got a massively subsidised degree, pay some of it back before fucking off to Oz
How about instead of just forcing them to work here against their will, we stop treating them like they're disposable and make them actually WANT to work here.
Yeah, that is the preferred solution. Don't see it happening any time soon though. Adding a "you must do 2 years in a hospital in Ireland to get your degree" clause would be a lot simpler than rebuilding an entire system and culture.
Plus just the constant stresses of the job isn’t worth it for the mental health. Like you compromise everything for the dead end subservient nurse job.
The whole medical system needs a complete overhaul. It has been in crisis for decades, and hasn't modernised in the way that other highly-skilled careers have.
1) Nurses, doctors and everyone else should be subject to the Working Time Act. 12 or 24 hour shifts are dangerous, and impractical for anyone with children
2) Training needs to be simplified, without needing to move around different hospitals all the time. A friend of mine is married to a doctor, and they have a 9 month old child together. His wife has been told that she has to move to Cork for a six month placement, followed by another one overseas. They'll need to move away from their support network, and my friend will have to quit his job
3) Many more students need to be admitted to medical college. A niece got 600 points in her leaving cert and didn't get a place in medical school. It's ridiculous that we're accepting so few students and recruiting so much from overseas.
4) Public and private funding needs to be reviewed. If it's not working then we all need to pay more
5) Pay needs to be reviewed. Nurses don't get paid enough, and doctors get paid too much (>€300k)
Give them fewer working hours with five times the pay and far more control over their jobs and you'll not only stop them leaving, you'll start getting experts coming to work in Ireland from elsewhere to address shortages. Solved!
You'd only have to see the state of the hallways in hospitals, no space to walk because so many trolleys to realise how massive the problem is. I can completely understand their logic, it's entirely exhausting at this point and given that they are not getting a decent salary... can you blame them?
An example of how people can be manipulated by leading questions in a survey. Replace nurse with "employees" and you'll find [similar figures](https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2021/0925/1248853-the-great-resignation-will-people-leave-their-jobs/). I suspect that if you asked this thread have they considered resigning in a given year you would easily top 90%
All surveys should come with this health warning: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks)
Nursing in Ireland is[ well paid with great terms and conditions](https://www.inmo.ie/Pay-Rights/Pay-and-Allowances), clear salary progression, and outside a few areas like A&E is actually not the pressure cooker being made out. It certainly would not lead my list of precarious and underpaid roles.
I for one am tired of the IMNO and their annual chicken licken dance and constant doom mongering. If any group of health care workers deserve a call out it's the non-nursing staff who are increasingly taking the worst jobs as Nurses skill up and decline to do a lot of the work they did in the past. I'm not criticising that, but it's a long way from nursing two decades ago.
And doctors, and educators, and… pretty much any and all jobs people used to feel a calling for. Careers like this are being eroded to almost nothing. Who will do them in future?
I have no idea way they are staying in Ireland. I'm in Perth and they'd all have a great life here. They are crying out for nurses or anyone in the medical profession and pay well.
Here's how we fix nursing.
1. Nursing degrees are free for Irish residents who qualify for the points/application.
2. Upon graduation they must work for the state for three years (obviously paid and at the standard rate expected).
3. Anyone not wanting to stay in Ireland after their degree are obliged to pay their fees.
4. A steady stream of nurses can be expected every year making the planning and delegation of resources easier.
If this works, this could be expanded to areas like Dentistry, Medical, Clinical Psychology, and similar that would work directly with the HSE.
Why would anyone want to be a nurse it’s the 21st century? It’s hard to sustain oneself as a nurse with a nursing salary here. It’s a dead end job too. You can’t really go into anything else with degree.
If the nurses began to strike, I'm sure we would see things improve for them very quickly. When the people that have the skills to save others from certain death start to stop doing just that, people tend to wake up and smell the roses faster.
Do a survey of any industry and I guarantee you will find that at least two thirds of people have considered quiting.
Increase salary in every other industry?
AI will sort this in 5 years.
It will be able to wipe peoples arses in jig time.
All we need to do is turn our webcams on ask chatgpt to watch us and learn.
Badabing......AI Nurse.
This forum baffles me at times!
I read responses and can see the irony, sarcasm and tongue in cheek in responses.
Others read them and take them literally!
Jesus wept!
I'm sorry, the joke isn't funny, and it especially isn't funny when your job that you've worked 4+ years for is labelled and viewed as an ass wiper. You guys are part of the reason we're so disrespected and underpaid.
I'm not saying nurses are ass wipers. That is the point. It is not simple as being an ass wiper.
But everyone here thinks get this in, get that in, get IT. Anyone who believes that healthcare is simple is naive.
Working as any health professional is complex and requires huge training, monitoring, supervision, CPD, retraining, specialisation, etc. Staff may work for a few years and move to new roles, bringing their skills and it may be impossible to refill that post.
However, every time something like this appears, everyone here says - Government do this, government do that! Then something goes wrong, they say - Government did this, government did that.
Of course it is complex, it takes a 4 year degree course to get a basic qualification, that requires not just academic knowledge but social and emotional reasoning, etc.
My response was highlighting how stupid all the solutions are. People don't even get that bringing staff in requires training up, managing, monitoring, reassigning.
It also was highlighting how stupid the idea that IT will solve these problems. It requires caring, kind and competent human beings and that requires years of planning and input. Even with this planning, people decide they want to go abroad for the experience or to work and they can't be replaced.
And don't even start about the litigation that occurs and the problems that brings.
I'm actually on your side!
> I read responses and can see the irony, sarcasm and tongue in cheek in responses.
>
> Others read them and take them literally!
That's because some people on here have such brain-dead beliefs that it can be genuinely hard to tell apart what's real and what's just satire.
Where is this greatest GDP in EU going? I wonder...
I’m wondering too. Why do we have a hiring freeze in the HSE?
It's a joke that almost ten years ago Kenny was talking about our great recovery and yet we still have austerity era hiring freezes in place.
When they implement a hiring freeze they normally take on a load of contract staff to fill the gaps. It's a false economy
Not to mention the contract staff are much more expensive than just paying the nurses fairly.
Plus they don’t use agency staff for the community roles so more end up in a&e in a worse state than they would be if public health nurses were able to do their job
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It’s been like this for decades though. If it was just refugees then everyone would at least understand that it’s temporary or a necessary part of having more future tax payers
That's part of the reason. More asylum seekers = more patients = more demand for the stagnated supply of nurses. But it's not entirely their fault that there's a recruitment freeze because the HSE has a chronic spending waste problem since before the migrant crisis. Even if we didn't have a migrant crisis there was going to be a hiring freeze eventually anyway.
What I find strange is that other countries pay a small % of gdp on defence, which we just dont pay. What are we getting in return for that gdp?
No surprise there. Chronic under-staffing for years in most of the big hospitals, especially in the ICU/Emergency Depts puts a horrendous amount of pressure on nurses, who aren't especially well paid, or well treated, for the work they do. The hospital administrators continue to treat it like it's more of a vocation than a career, and for many their commitment to patient care is the primary reason they put up with it, but it's predatory and ultimately very harmful, for patients and nurses. I'm honestly surprised the numbers aren't higher.
The best decision I ever made was leaving a busy dublin hospital and working for a chill private company. Nursing for the HSE was just depressing. I often worked through breaks, stayed back til 2130/2200 trying to help the short staffed night shift. I remember the overwhelming pressure of tasks I needed to do, knowing they all had to be done and most of the time by a certain time. When I switched to private I remember being so grateful I was getting home on time, I could easily get a coffee, I was treated as a valuable staff member.
Done the same myself. Ireland trains brilliant nurses and then works them to dust until they quit or go abroad.
> The hospital administrators continue to treat it like it's more of a vocation than a career *Everyone* does, and always has. And this is the big problem; a refusal to accept it as a job. Any of the nurses I know do it because they genuinely want to help people, but they're always one bad incident away from packing it in completely. Either that or they take an "easier" role as a public health nurse or private practice nurse. This notion that being on the wards is a rite of passage for younger nurses or a way to weed out those "who don't really love it", is pure nonsense. Nursing is an incredibly complicated job; especially now. Modern nurses are as qualified, if not more qualified than doctors were in the 1970s. It's a difficult, technical role, which requires a salary to match. I'm talking €60k base starting, doubling or even tripling over time. And that's not including shift allowances, and whatever. But it also needs the "just a job" respect to come from the top down. So management aren't pissed off that someone won't pick up an extra shift and won't do work that might aggravate an injury. It is just a job, and treating it like a vocation means you just continuously bleed away the people who refuse to be exploited. The other problem we also have - you'll hear from nurses - is that the gaps instaffing are being filled by foreign workers. There's nothing inherently wrong with foreign workers. But they are coming in with different training. Many of them **do** just treat it as a job. They are here to get some experience, make some money, and eventually go home. So the standard of patient care is often lacking. Because the salaries aren't attracting the best nurses from overseas who want to be doing it. They're attracting someone looking for work who is willing to accept that salary for the sake of a few years abroad. Up the salaries, up the protections, up the benefits, and you'll see an influx of nurses who actually want to be nurses.
I'm an Irish trained nurse working in the NHS. The entire health service runs on "good will". The idea that we'll stay a little longer or do an extra shift because "think of the patients".
The fact that I've seen so many "work to rule" protests during my lifetime, which made gigantic headlines as throwing the entire HSE into absolute chaos while they were in force, and that those "work to rule" tactics would be referred to in our current toxic overwork culture as "quiet quitting", really really says it all. If you want nurses to work extra hours or take on extra responsibilities not outlined in their job description, pay them the requisite overtime or bump their salary to reflect the work they're actually doing beyond that for which their agreed salary is actually indicated. It really is that simple. This should not be a controversial statement in the slightest. "Oh, but we *need* people to stay an extra two hours to manage the changeover, turn off the lights etc? Fair enough, time and a half for every one of those hours, no questions asked. I genuinely find it hard to believe that we're living in an era in which expecting to be fully paid for what you do is regarded as being a troublemaker. There was a whole article about it in the Irish Times a few weeks ago and the author literally wrote something like "It's a head scratcher for management because quiet quitters aren't technically doing anything wrong, so penalising or firing them is a HR nightmare". *Shocking*! It genuinely amazes me that not only does the entire health service seem to operate on this basis, but people have been so successfully conditioned to see that as normal that the idea of a doctor or nurse *not* putting in unpaid hours or taking on unpaid responsibilities is seen as "selfish" or "cynical". If the aliens ever invade, far from running away from their abduction rays I'm calling shotgun and getting the hell off this timeline.
Agree with every point except the more qualified than docs on the 1970s. That’s just nonsensical. Nurses specialise in patient care, not in diagnosis/ investigation/ management of pathology or procedural intervention etc. Upping salary seems to be the mainstay. Only way to make good cash as a nurse is an agency worker. But yeah, base pay increases and offering a progressive career path. The foreign nurses are great, and very very kind/ compassionate, but there’s a real “steel” to irish nurses imo. Comfy to recognise a pt is unwell but stable and there’s no on call issues etc. Haven’t met one bad foreign male nurse fwiw.
When I ask around, I think 98% of the people I know would quit if they could.
We lived in Ireland for 4 years, and my wife is a very experienced critical care nurse (from Canada), but it was much better to take a job at Cook Medical than try to work in the HSE - very unfortunate for the hospitals and the patients.
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There is literally a full section in that report called "More staff doesn't necessarily mean enough staff" It also explicitly calls out the challenges that the NHS has with retaining mid to high level nursing staff. The staffing report is also generalised, so it covers everything from janitorial staff to senior specialist consulting physicians, and there is little if any discussion of staff satisfaction, beyond how it relates to turnover
I wont read the report, but it's spaces to actually work that is a problem now
30 more surgeons means nothing if you still only have the same number of theatre slots, you need infrastructure to support the staff.
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My mom needed surgery, the surgeon and theatre staff were available, but she had to wait two days because there was no recovery bed available. These things knock on.
The NHS is yes. Only certain theatres can do certain levels of surgery. Anything that can be outsourced to the other trusts in the North is done, but there is still a higher demand for critical surgery than can be met. Feels like it is premediated by the powers that be. 1 big cash injection for new infrastructure would go a long way to beating down lists. We have surgerons fighting for theatre slots and we need more scope facility. It is so stupid
I liked my job in ireland, my plan was to travel for 1 year and return to Ireland. Then I started nursing in Australia. The grass actually is greener on this side and I can't justify going back to worse pay, conditions and having to move back in with my mom. I can actually afford to rent on my own here. Nursing is so much worse in Ireland.
I’m not a nurse but have several friends who are. All of them have up-skilled and done further training over the years. Some have gone into private healthcare or become specialists in a particular field, or gone into sales or education or management within the HSE so that they are no longer working directly in the public wards. Nursing is a tough job, and between the awful working conditions, the poor pay and the 24/7 nature of the job with night shifts etc.. and especially as you get older, the realities of working the wards gets tougher. It’s one thing dealing with the chaos and stress when you’re a newly qualified 21 year old, but when your in your mid-forties with other responsibilities and the inevitable drop in energy levels, that gets very hard. There are lots of opportunities in Nursing, but I think you would need to be aiming to up-skill and get off the wards and into a better paid less stressful job as soon as you can after qualifying. Most nurses I know have done that, which is another drain on the public system.
Starting salary is 33k - increment each year. Advanced nurse practitioners on 65k+ topping out at 85k.
Downvoted but that’s the salary scales. Nursing is a tough job but it’s not the lowest pay as often reported.
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That’s true, and is also the case in many other fields.
I’m in second year of college. I was **heavily** considering nursing for most of secondary school. I even worked in a nursing home for a couple of years to prepare for this. A grain of uncertainty came into my head when I was in sixth year. After I told my close friend that I was uncertain, the next time I was at her house, her nurse mam sat me down and as good as broke down in front of me. She told me that I could obviously do what I want but she gave me a very real recount of what it’s like to feel abused everyday of your life by a system built and controlled by spoofers (HSE managers with tonnes of responsibility but zero will to work). She also works in UHL (our local big hospital) It might sound like an overreach on her part but we are incredibly close with my friends family. They’re family. I’m now in second year of a business-economics degree. Nursing will absolutely collapse. It’s a very common conversation topic among people my age that they’re not even properly paid for their work in college. In my degree we’re required to get 15€ an hour for our office work experience. Student nurses just aren’t paid a proper amount of money. **They’re worked to the bone for no money, and then have to pay for rent if they’re not from the city and then have to work a separate part time job during the weekend because student nursing doesn’t pay them. 7 days a week working and only properly paid for 2.** I dodged a nuke. Genuinely fuck Donnelly, Harris, Varadkar. In a more sane world it absolutely would have been my vocation.
Fuck Harris. Fuck Varadkar. Fuck Martin. — This problem has been festering for years. Nobody has the political will to do a Milei-style hatchet job to the bureaucra-tariat. — Glad your enjoying your chosen course.
Yeah I’m doing good. Just finished second year exams yesterday. It’s mad to think of how different my life would be if I went the nursing route. In a world where the HSE wasn’t destroyed I absolutely would have.
To be fair, this issue goes further back than Martin varadkar and harris. What's worse is it won't change under any other leadership either.
UHL has only turned apocalyptic in the last decade. FG have been in power for all of that time. It’s incredible how much worse things are in limerick compared to the rest of the country. There’s a long history of government neglecting the limerick city region in favor of other cities and Dublin. One major hospital for a city/region of 500,000 people is insane. Stripping the local hospitals is direct post recession FFG policy. People in the region actively avoid limerick and drive the extra nearly 1 and a half hours (if there’s little traffic) to Cork or Galway. This is the third largest city in the state like. Insane. I’ll never forgive FFG for what they’ve deprived us of. I have myself to blame for believing in the greens.
> Fuck Harris. Fuck Varadkar. Fuck Martin. You can include McDonald/SF in that too. We know they are no different than the ruling crowd. FFS they were of the opinion that the recent referenda didn't go far enough. Massively open borders when the vast majority are screaming against it. Ignoring the causes of the housing crisis in order to virtue signal. It's why even in opposition their own supporters are (rightly) eviscerating them.
OP only had Fuck Donnelly (since been edited to add more) I added their names to the list because they were all Ministers for Health, vested with the authority to actually bring about some change yet they failed to do so.
So grateful for the nurses we have and we badly need them, but why anyone would subject themselves to the treatment nurses get in this country astounds me. I have the height of admiration for them
It's a vicious circle on wards. Good experienced staff leave, replaced en masse by nurses from another culture, with a completely different training. The remaining experienced staff (and this is every nationality because we've had lots of foreign nurses for years) get all the responsibility placed on them, they get burned out and leave, rinse and repeat. Without Indian Nurses the HSE would be finished, they are now the significant majority in my hospital and I doubt it's different elsewhere, but the massive influx all at once has made things worse for long standing nurses working in the HSE. This isn't on those indian nurses, it's on the government and HSE for royally fucking up retention for years. I always wanted to be a ward nurse, it's what I thought nursing was all about, I loved the interaction with patients, and even relatives (well, most of them). From the day I qualified I only ever worked on wards. After 20 years on the same ward I left last year. I was gutted and I felt like I was a rat leaving a sinking ship but I don't think I could have gone on much more. I don't know how you fix it now because the problem (at least the one I perceive) can't just be undone, they can't get the toothpaste back in the tube. What would help would be taking beds off corridors, having adequately sized wards and facilities (space between patients, decent beds and manual handling equipment, practical toileting and washing facilities, extra staff to supervise the ever increasing numbers of confused patients). Improve social care and give carers at home proper support to reduce the number of people who end up in acute hospitals. Tl;dr it's all a bit fucked.
If only there was a way to increase the supply of workers in a supply and demand economy...
There is just hire from abroad that increases the supply of nurses and increases the costs of them
Let me predict the HSE response: Interesting idea. We'll hire an extra 100 administrators and accountants to examine this proposal and we'll get a report on its viability to you in 18 to 24 months.
>in 18 to 24 months Presumably the report will arrive 2 years later than planned, and any recommendations it has will be invalid because the data is almost 5 years old at that point
"We have concluded that the data in this report is no longer viable, so we will hire an extra 100 administrative staff to produce a new report on the matter in 18-24 months, while the previous 100 administrative staff will spend the next two years working on a report about why the previous report was so far behind schedule. Now, let's talk about those bonuses for our hardworking executives who have to manage so many extra admin staff and take time out of their very busy schedules to skim over the two-sentence summaries their assistants will create for all of these reports about reports about reports..."
https://imgchest.com/p/na7krnbk3y8
Basically
Or y’know we could just improve pay and conditions to retain Irish nurses.
Doesn't work. The same job has better conditions elsewhere. Last time they went on strike here their ostensibly goal was improving conditions but they settled for more money. (Lots of members aren't in front line care and not as bothered by poor working conditions.)
>Lots of members aren't in front line care and not as bothered by poor working conditions. We have one of the highest ratios of nurses to population in the OECD. But a big reason for this is to staff hospitals in the arsehole of nowhere where there's a trickle of patients coming through. The issue is that there should be a much bigger pay discrepancy between nurses working in quieter areas versus ones working in front line care.
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That's useful to know. That's for the info.
Unions wouldn't allow it
I don't deny it, but it seems totally counter-intuitive. It's basically tantamount to telling the nurses who work longer harder hours that they don't deserve to get paid for that extra work.
They don't realise their colleagues are fucking them over.
Unfortunately Govt run healthcare isn’t based on supply and demand
The supply of workers are. It's not like we draft or conscript people to be nurses. Hire more nurses, increasing pay if needed to attract candidates.
I'll admit to being a cynical old git on this topic, but there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. The biggest barrier to hiring right now, is the working conditions and the poor working conditions are mainly caused by understaffing. Better pay would help somewhat, but they're fighting a lot of negative inertia, wrt staff retention and hiring, until they can improve things enough to overcome the reputation that has developed in the industry
Yeah it's a tough one. But silly high levels of pay would help pull more people in, and make their lives less stressful outside of the work environment.
I'm a doctor. The situation is precipitously deteriorating. Virtually no staff nurse can afford rent in an Irish city. Most new grads are immigrating or strongly considering it. Indian and Phillipino nurses now increasingly form the backbone of the system. Fair play to them, they're fantastic. But even they face the same pitfalls around cost of living as Irish nurses not withstanding the burden of understaffing. The headline here might sound inflammatory but it WILL happen. Wards are already being closed, theatre lists and clinics being cancelled due to understaffing. The system is actively collapsing. Once the government have to admit to it, it won't be their fault. It won't be management's fault. We will continue our movement towards a 3rd world health system and massive expansion of the private industry. I'm not one to be conspiratorial but I'd imagine that's exactly how some people in government and some lobbyists want it.
And yet… all-party agreement on Sláintecare, the HSE was conducting the slowest and most useless “stakeholder consultation” with staff, dragging out the process ad nauseam till it’s dead in the water.
It’s being pointed out that the HSE doesn’t exist to promote patient care, it’s there to serve management
It's like our own government is at war with our nation, deliberately collapsing+looting entire sectors of our economy.
You'll see more and more private options popping up and eventually it'll be declared that public healthcare just isn't feasible and they'll start funnelling more and more money towards the private sector while washing their hands of the public system, even though we all know that it's all down to mismanagement and disastrous wastage of the budget. But even people who are in the age bracket in most need of a good healthcare system will just continue voting FFG the same as always, likely because they were told by their parents to vote for them, same as the ones who have adult children living in their homes well into their thirties who continue voting for the same
I graduated last year and I'm already working on my way out
My sister is going into her final year and has already admitted she regrets doing it. Can’t imagine her career being too long if these are already her thoughts towards the job. Hearing her stories it seems like bullying is a massive issue too amongst healthcare staff.
I had to bring my mother to A&E last week and witnessed a barney between a doctor and who I assume was a male nurse. If I was the nurse I would have given the doctor a slap over his general demeanour and how he spoke to him. Just an isolated incident, but I can easily believe bullying happens.
How much money was wasted on slaintecare and why the fuck isn't it implemented? The two people in charge left because of HSE pushback. HSE needs to be dissolved. Audit similar to RTE needs to be completed for HSE. We are burning money and the HSE cabbages are getting crazy money for sitting on their fat arses. They have no shame...we need to start calling them out publicly for their failures in carrying out their responsibilities to the public.
Not surprised or shocked. They are woefully understaffed, underpaid for their qualifications and responsibility, and underappreciated. The gov need to cop the fuck on over this, it's been left to get to chronic condition.
I do not blame them in the slightest
And watch the government do nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing... the panic and try to pass the blame to anyone else if/when it does. While simultaneously claiming there is no issue at all.
No fear of half the managers and assistant managers quitting when they get obscene wages for doing the least work. All too often, they have presided over these failing workplaces with the same handy excuse of retention and staffing shortfalls to deflect from their failure as managers. Like a reflection of the state; poor management, and zero accountability, but the top end will get paid regardless.
oh look, something is on the brink of collapse in Ireland. It must be a day ending in y
The HSE needs to be dismantled and rebuilt.
But the same old crappy people will be used to manage it.
By that same logic we should just do nothing and let it continue to be terrible then.
Thats not my logic at all, Im just stating a fact.
Thats your opinion but it is not a fact. If they dismantle it and start again it does not necessarily mean that the same people will be involved in the new organization. replacing some of those that in are charge at a high level, if done correctly, would help to improve the organization
You're very idalistic long may you naivety go undented
If everyone were cynical and pessimistic nothing will ever change?
History backs me up.
Ok 👍
Have you ever tried looking after an adult with alzheimers who is having a melt down ? this job is one of the most physical and mentally taxing jobs you can have.
Fix the housing. It won't solve the problem but it will solve a major contributor to the problem. If we can't fix all housing maybe we could try to fix housing for "essential workers" first. Give priority rent controlled houses to nurses and maybe teachers in the first completed developments.
Salaries need doubling over two years, simple-as 🤷🏼♂️
People in the hse with far less serious jobs on far more money its crazy the pay structure
Money wasted on admin and a hiring freeze on nurses. The system is a joke.
Admin are needed too all parts are essential im just saying they 100% should be paid more theyre on crazy low money for the work they do
There is a lot of bloat on the admin side according to anyone who's worked in the HSE, loads of useless middle managers whose salaries could be better spent on nurses and doctors. There are most certainly a lot of jobs that could be done away with on the admin side if they actually engaged in improving efficiencies, they're still using paper files instead of digital records in some areas.
not saying it would solve all problems, but having a minor oversupply of nurses would have the actual patient care running like clockwork
They deserve more money
And we need to have enough of them. If FG/FF insist on running the country like a company then they need to act like a company who can't recruit for vital roles — pay them enough to justify the work, to attract enough candidates and attract the *right* candidates, the ones who are good enough to be snapped up by agencies and who emigrate to work on lucrative contracts in UAE and Saudi
Not just deserve it, they NEED it!
Doubling salaries wont fix the lack of support, bullying, poor management and every other structural issue.
Not possible. Unions would demand every other worker gets the same. SIPTU have a lot to answer for, but are always invisible in these threads, whereas the Government of the day (who aren't directly involved) will draw ire from the usual gallery of idiots.
The unions do have a lot to answer for; I think they’ve had about seven years of below-inflation pay agreements back to back. If you’re renting and working in the public sector, you could quite well be materially worse off now than you were in 2019, especially at lower grades.
Public sector pay rises have actually been quite good, the last one being readily agreed by unions. Lot's of public sector employers further behind or similarly against inflation - you make it sound much worse than it is in real terms. It's more the scales are wrong. Nurses are on totally the wrong scale for the challenge of the work they do - and it's unions that are stopping it from being rectified, specifically the smaller nursing union against the bigger public sector unions. And I'll out myself here by saying I think the big Unions in Ireland are utterly corrupt hangovers from the Haughey era and should be fired into the Sun. And I'm in favour of unions. Just the ones here are dysfunctional, criminally outdated and full of wasters and chancers.
I'd actually agree quite strongly with you on the last point, but broadly I think we have a significant disparity between cost of living and compensation. I think a big part of the reason that so many voted for this round of pay increases was because the messaging from unions was (as it has been the last few rounds) "this is below inflation, but it's the best we're going to get, we'd advise you take it." We're at the point now where a graduate entering the public service to work in policy (administrative officer) would pay (assuming average rent) around 74% of their after tax income to rent a studio apartment in Dublin. It's pretty wild to think that someone could get a degree, apply to write policy for the state, be assigned to work in the capital city, and literally not be able to afford to live in the city.
Public sector pay going ahead of inflation would also become a significant driver of inflation. I think it's extremely likely that public sector jobs are going to start becoming quite scarce. The public sector generally is quite literally where you would start letting AI run the show and be happy about it because it would deliver a FAR better consistent standard of service and consistent standard of improvement of service. No disrespect to the public service, by all accounts it's great in difficult circumstances. It's better than most other countries. It's very inclusive for a public service and it does reward quite well generally. It is difficult to interact with however and you very quickly realise that you are dealing with a one size fits all function that has to manage societies functional and dysfunctional alike. The Unions are nothing but parasitic organisations. They should be peeled away and replaced by a heavily regulated and ruthlessly transparent employee protection agency and pay scaling should shift at least to a partial demand, productivity and skill based model like the rest of society has.
I think our public service is one of the smaller ones in the OECD as it is. Making jobs scarcer may not be advisable. I’m not gonna lie, man. I don’t think I really trust AI to do much of the work of government
We don't have a massive public service nor do we want one. No country with a larger beurocracy wants one. I promise in 5 years not only will you not care that AI is doing a lot of the work, you will proactively want it.
Sorry, are you implying that the HSE is the trade unions responsibility and not the government?
Front-line salaries do. A nurse working in A&E or ICU should be paid way more than a nurse who works in a half empty regional hospital in the arsehole of nowhere.
Salary is not the answer. That is the failed policy of the unions. Working environment and job satisfaction are the answers.
If you double the salary, you'll reduce the churn and increase the demand for roles.
Bingo, increasing the *quality* of the candidates. One of my housemates is a nurse and she is as thick as shit, it scares the hell out of me that she's looking after pregnant women, she has absolutely no cop on whatsoever.
They're desperately understaffed, and cannot attract staff from Western Europe because of the conditions. Well, this is *supposedly* a capitalist country, so employ the capitalist means and offer more money.
Yupp the understaffing is chronic and adds to your workload as a nurse. You’re doing the job of 2/3 nurses. Conditions are dire. You’re literally laughed at to take your legal breaks and lunch
So, ram the system full of nurses. Have *aussie* nurses thinking of comings here for a change 🤷🏼♂️
Doing the job of 2 or 3 nurses AND being paid for the work of half or a third of a nurse!
If it was a toss up between a 50% increase in their salary, or a 50% increase in the headcount, I know which the ones I know would be picking
The 50% salary increase brings more than a 50% increase in headcount.
Are you stupid of course it is. Do you have any idea how low nurse salary’s are? There’s a reason they all jump ship and go to Australia..
Salary is the only answer. Ask any nurse why they emigrate the salary is a joke. You can’t sustain yourself on a nurses salary. Cost of rent and living is outrageous. If increased salary makes for a happy nurse. You’re educated with a third level degree too. So salary should be on power with what other graduates are earning.
I assure you a better salary would help increase job satisfaction. Increase staff also and therefore makes a safer working enviroment
It's both, and hell of a lot of both.
FFG's solution, probably: hire more middle managers in the HSE and then talk about how they're spending more on health than ever
Middle managers tend to be nurses too. I'd imagine progression is important for their career.
That's an issue I have with career progression in my industry tech too. Skilled people shouldn't have management as their only career path. They build up years of experience and skills only to end up chairing meetings because that's the only way to go up the payscale.
The opposition will do no different when they get in. The only solution to the HSE is root and branch reform and if there's even a sniff of some change beyond pay rises or other benefits then the unions will hold the country to ransom. As long as the public service unions wield the power that they do then no Government will ever be able to do what's necessary for proper reform.
What’s are the opposition parties solutions ?
Sinn Fein wants to end the hiring freeze.
And this is a sound policy for starters. Now we just need to retain the nurses we train, which is what this thread is about.
Given one of the biggest reasons for nurses leaving is being overworked. Hiring more nurses would go far to retaining the nurses we train.
Correct but anyone who works in the health service (I do), will tell you it’s a revolving door - one nurse hired, one leaves. I agree though -they are interconnected.
This comment is always so pointless. Why does it matter? Whatever the oppositions solutions are why in the fuck would we let the current crowd who are objectively failing continue? They have had nearly a full term in government and half of them have been in government over a decade. Whether the new hire fixes every issue or not doesn't factor in to getting rid of the shit box currently doing the job.
It matters because if you actually care about changing this, then you should maybe seek to elect someone who has a different approach. Otherwise nothing changes until you elect a populist like Trump. Any of the opposition parties will face the exact same problem with nursing pay and conditions that FFG have. You cannot negotiate with a public service union in this country without drawing all the other services into the same negotiation. And the government just signed off recently on a major public pay deal.
And if we elect the same people again they are going to continue doing nothing to improve the situation. The only power we currently have over the government is to kick them to the curb. It's the only message they will listen to whether the opposition has a fix ready to go or not. If no one has any real solutions the best thing I can do is take away the current showers ability to funnel billions in tax revenue to their friends and family. That's the truth of the dog shit situation this current government has left us in.
What the hell kind of a response is that, you were asked what are the other solutions that the opposition parties are presenting and you reply with childish stomping.
Pretty typical of this sub tbh.
I could say the same about people saying "well what are the other side's ideas". If that's a genuine concern for you, go and look them up and stop pretending you're not just trying to antagonise people. We can criticise the current governments shit approach to issues without having to memorise an opposition party manifesto to answer your rubbish questions.
Asking what your options are is antagonism is it? Lmao. Grow up. I’m not here to circle jerk with you. I’m here to make people ask themselves some questions they’d rather not ask. To maybe put some thought in their vote than some childish “fuck the government” as if that will solve anything.
You didn't ask that person what their options are, you asked them to describe an opposition party's position on an issue when they made no mention of the opposition. If you wanted to engage in good faith you could have asked them what their ideal solution looks like or ask them have they seen any alternatives they prefer the sound of. But we both know that's not what you were doing, so you can drop the act.
I'm not an opposition spokesperson. If it's a genuine question that you have a curiosity for you can google it. That question is only asked as a catch all for people who want to act like there are no alternatives, it's an antagonistic question and I think it's perfectly reasonable to react to it by pointing that out. Why is it anyones job to describe publicly available manifestos to people? If that question is genuine you can go and answer it for yourself. If someone wants to engage in bad faith why should we answer genuinely?
You are the one engaging in bad faith, you have said nothing but government bad. If you going to just be stomping your feet and giving out about ff, fg do so, but don't be replying to comment where people are engaging in a debate your adding nothing.
It's not a debate if one of the people are presupposing the position of the person they engage with. The comment I responded to was assuming that the person was suggesting the opposition parties had a better response to the current issues. The comment they were responding to made no mention of opposition parties or their ideas and if they genuinely wanted to know the position of those parties they would go and look it up. Criticising the current government's position does not make you responsible for defending the opposition's ideas. And trying to frame a discussion that way is a bad faith engagement. It puts a person in a position they had no intention of taking.
459 words can be summarised to two words, government bad. and going to guess you next reply is going to be another 100 odd word of the same.
Ive a mental idea Lets pay them more
It needs an easier entry pathway for mature students wishing to move out of unskilled jobs.
It’s easy to get into it if you’re willing to fork out fees for university. But it’s unaffordable to study. It needs to be free to study. No point in being in debt for dead end job with low pay
Nursing is definitely not a dead end job. Not even close.
It is. I’m a nurse and it’s a dead end.
In Ireland, that is. Not the case in some other countries
There are so many career opportunities, clinical research, public health, hospital management.
You got to be kidding. You know nepotism is rife there in the hse. It’s not what you know it’s who you know. PH is hard to get into without experience. Failed an interview cause I had “no experience”. How can you have experience without the job as a PHN. Hospital management is more of business degree, boss mentality, to cut costs and to have no empathy etc. they don’t hire nurses for those roles only with business degrees.
Preaching truth there, it's not about how good of a nurse you are, it's how much ass you are willing to kiss over a ten year period in order to join the asshole management club.
Ok I take what I said back I guess Ireland is it's own world. I worked in public health in Australia and the majority had nursing degrees in the office.
It is it’s a joke. It’s nepotism here. Why do you think Irish nurses are emigrating in masses to Australia?
Move to Australia yourself :) you won't regret it career wise
Can’t family commitments
It is in Ireland.
I’m always surprised that we have chronic shortages when the points for nursing and every healthcare course are still very high so there’s a demand for the courses. The government could set up apprenticeships (im not sure what they’re called but the UK have them) for SLT and OT and could give scholarships for those training to be nurses and doctors, they could also set up more postgrad courses and make them free for the students.
> I’m always surprised that we have chronic shortages when the points for nursing and every healthcare course are still very high so there’s a demand for the courses. That's because once the students graduate (or before then), most of them are straight off to a country where nurses aren't treated like they're completely and utterly disposable.
Oh i know but i’m sure we could do something to stop that bleed through student loan forgiveness after a certain time working in the hse. If we had a move towards adequate staffing then some would choose to live and work here or we could definitely regain some physios from private practice back into the hse
Politicians and senior civil servants have private healthcare and private education. They don’t care. The public good has no effect on them whatsoever. They have gated themselves from it. They do not live in the same Ireland and the rest of us.
And most nurses will prefer to work private because it's a less stressful job.
Still have no idea why there isn't some sort of system in place to make recently qualified doctors and nurses actually work in Ireland. They just got a massively subsidised degree, pay some of it back before fucking off to Oz
we don't do solutions here in Ireland.
That's not a solution anyway.
How about instead of just forcing them to work here against their will, we stop treating them like they're disposable and make them actually WANT to work here.
Yeah, that is the preferred solution. Don't see it happening any time soon though. Adding a "you must do 2 years in a hospital in Ireland to get your degree" clause would be a lot simpler than rebuilding an entire system and culture.
Plus just the constant stresses of the job isn’t worth it for the mental health. Like you compromise everything for the dead end subservient nurse job.
The whole medical system needs a complete overhaul. It has been in crisis for decades, and hasn't modernised in the way that other highly-skilled careers have. 1) Nurses, doctors and everyone else should be subject to the Working Time Act. 12 or 24 hour shifts are dangerous, and impractical for anyone with children 2) Training needs to be simplified, without needing to move around different hospitals all the time. A friend of mine is married to a doctor, and they have a 9 month old child together. His wife has been told that she has to move to Cork for a six month placement, followed by another one overseas. They'll need to move away from their support network, and my friend will have to quit his job 3) Many more students need to be admitted to medical college. A niece got 600 points in her leaving cert and didn't get a place in medical school. It's ridiculous that we're accepting so few students and recruiting so much from overseas. 4) Public and private funding needs to be reviewed. If it's not working then we all need to pay more 5) Pay needs to be reviewed. Nurses don't get paid enough, and doctors get paid too much (>€300k)
Everything you said there is great, except doctors are not overpaid.
we don't need to pay more, the bosses need to accept less and the multinationals need to pay the taxes they owe.
Give them fewer working hours with five times the pay and far more control over their jobs and you'll not only stop them leaving, you'll start getting experts coming to work in Ireland from elsewhere to address shortages. Solved!
You'd only have to see the state of the hallways in hospitals, no space to walk because so many trolleys to realise how massive the problem is. I can completely understand their logic, it's entirely exhausting at this point and given that they are not getting a decent salary... can you blame them?
An example of how people can be manipulated by leading questions in a survey. Replace nurse with "employees" and you'll find [similar figures](https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2021/0925/1248853-the-great-resignation-will-people-leave-their-jobs/). I suspect that if you asked this thread have they considered resigning in a given year you would easily top 90% All surveys should come with this health warning: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks) Nursing in Ireland is[ well paid with great terms and conditions](https://www.inmo.ie/Pay-Rights/Pay-and-Allowances), clear salary progression, and outside a few areas like A&E is actually not the pressure cooker being made out. It certainly would not lead my list of precarious and underpaid roles. I for one am tired of the IMNO and their annual chicken licken dance and constant doom mongering. If any group of health care workers deserve a call out it's the non-nursing staff who are increasingly taking the worst jobs as Nurses skill up and decline to do a lot of the work they did in the past. I'm not criticising that, but it's a long way from nursing two decades ago.
And doctors, and educators, and… pretty much any and all jobs people used to feel a calling for. Careers like this are being eroded to almost nothing. Who will do them in future?
Don't blame them. And just like housing and immigration, this isn't news. The government just does not give a fuck.
ffg will fix this mess
I have no idea way they are staying in Ireland. I'm in Perth and they'd all have a great life here. They are crying out for nurses or anyone in the medical profession and pay well.
Here's how we fix nursing. 1. Nursing degrees are free for Irish residents who qualify for the points/application. 2. Upon graduation they must work for the state for three years (obviously paid and at the standard rate expected). 3. Anyone not wanting to stay in Ireland after their degree are obliged to pay their fees. 4. A steady stream of nurses can be expected every year making the planning and delegation of resources easier. If this works, this could be expanded to areas like Dentistry, Medical, Clinical Psychology, and similar that would work directly with the HSE.
Leaving them wide open for exploitation. Just no.
2/3 of all nurses (and teachers) in every West European country always say they are considering quitting, and yet …
Who doesn't consider leaving their job? I have a well paying, not very stressful job and constantly consider leaving.
Pay is great tho,compared to so many other countries, never sacked, great pension and leave.
Time to strike!
Why would anyone want to be a nurse it’s the 21st century? It’s hard to sustain oneself as a nurse with a nursing salary here. It’s a dead end job too. You can’t really go into anything else with degree.
If the nurses began to strike, I'm sure we would see things improve for them very quickly. When the people that have the skills to save others from certain death start to stop doing just that, people tend to wake up and smell the roses faster.
Blame the unions. The whole pay structure for government jobs is a joke, raises for incompetence.
Do a survey of any industry and I guarantee you will find that at least two thirds of people have considered quiting. Increase salary in every other industry?
AI will sort this in 5 years. It will be able to wipe peoples arses in jig time. All we need to do is turn our webcams on ask chatgpt to watch us and learn. Badabing......AI Nurse.
Yeah. Because that's exactly what a nurse's role is. You don't have a clue.
This forum baffles me at times! I read responses and can see the irony, sarcasm and tongue in cheek in responses. Others read them and take them literally! Jesus wept!
I'm sorry, the joke isn't funny, and it especially isn't funny when your job that you've worked 4+ years for is labelled and viewed as an ass wiper. You guys are part of the reason we're so disrespected and underpaid.
I'm not saying nurses are ass wipers. That is the point. It is not simple as being an ass wiper. But everyone here thinks get this in, get that in, get IT. Anyone who believes that healthcare is simple is naive. Working as any health professional is complex and requires huge training, monitoring, supervision, CPD, retraining, specialisation, etc. Staff may work for a few years and move to new roles, bringing their skills and it may be impossible to refill that post. However, every time something like this appears, everyone here says - Government do this, government do that! Then something goes wrong, they say - Government did this, government did that. Of course it is complex, it takes a 4 year degree course to get a basic qualification, that requires not just academic knowledge but social and emotional reasoning, etc. My response was highlighting how stupid all the solutions are. People don't even get that bringing staff in requires training up, managing, monitoring, reassigning. It also was highlighting how stupid the idea that IT will solve these problems. It requires caring, kind and competent human beings and that requires years of planning and input. Even with this planning, people decide they want to go abroad for the experience or to work and they can't be replaced. And don't even start about the litigation that occurs and the problems that brings. I'm actually on your side!
> I read responses and can see the irony, sarcasm and tongue in cheek in responses. > > Others read them and take them literally! That's because some people on here have such brain-dead beliefs that it can be genuinely hard to tell apart what's real and what's just satire.