INMO To Commence National Ballot For Industrial Action

Special recruitment/retention initiatives required immediately

• Accelerated restoration of cuts to pay and conditions required under Lansdowne Road Agreement

The Executive Council, of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation’s (INMO), has unanimously decided to commence a nationwide ballot of members in protest at their current working environment and the failure of management to recruit/retain nursing/ midwifery staff.

This follows a review of the outcome of 12 regional consultation meetings, with members, and other workplace meetings together with email correspondence relating to the pay, working conditions and staffing currently being experienced.

At all of the consultative meetings, individual Executive members reported extreme anger from nurses and midwives in the frontline.  The meetings were supplied with multiple examples of:

• chronic persistent overcrowding with no additional staff;

• excessive working hours (unpaid);

• repeated episodes of missed care, in acute, care of the elderly and disability services, with up to 30 patients being left under the sole care of third year students;  and

• community services which are unable to fulfil statutory functions and are held together purely by nurses carrying excessive workloads and having to work extended unpaid additional hours.

The situation is such that the Executive Council have formed the view that the health, safety and welfare of staff, and patients, is, on a daily basis, compromised.

The Government, HSE and all health employers must recognise the need to recruit and retain additional numbers of nurses and midwives in order to provide safe care.  However the current efforts to recruit have failed as they simply cannot compete with either overseas recruitment markets and our own private hospital sector.  Special recruitment and retention incentives are therefore required if the public health service is to succeed in attracting the nursing/midwifery staffing levels required to ensure safe care.

In making this decision the Executive Council again noted that the health service continues to have 3,800 less nursing/midwifery posts than it had in 2009.

Against this stark, unsafe and unsustainable background the Executive Council has decided that the current, appalling, conditions for patients, and the utter disrespect by employers for nurses and midwives, must cease.  The Organisation will now ballot members for a campaign of industrial action, commencing with a work to rule, which will be followed by a series of one day work stoppages.

This industrial action will seek to secure:

• incentives aimed at enhancing the ability of health employers to recruit and retain nursing/midwifery staff; and

• secure adequate staffing levels, or to curtail services to a level necessary to provide safe care and a safe working environment, for members.

The Executive Council confirmed their commitment to the Lansdowne Road Agreement but demand immediate public service wide engagement, with government, to accelerate the pay restoration process.

Speaking this afternoon INMO President Martina Harkin-Kelly said:

“Our members have spoken and have clearly indicated they can no longer endure the working environment and will no longer accept having their professional judgement disrespected or ignored by management.

Nursing and midwifery is in crisis and our health services are failing to meet the needs of patients.  This action is absolutely necessary, and justified, in the interests of patients and our members.  Accepted worldwide evidence demonstrates that patients are safest and mortality rates lower when there are sufficient nurses and midwives working in positive environments providing their care”.

INMO General Secretary Liam Doran said:

“The level of anger, within our membership, was palpable at the recent meetings.  This action seeks to have government and management come forward with special initiatives that will attract and retain the required number of nurses and midwives to staff our service safely and expand it to meet ever increasing demand.

In addition we will, in conjunction with our public service union colleagues, participate in early discussions, with government, which must deliver an acceleration in the restoration of pay and other conditions of employment which were cut in recent years”.