Dear Members
I hope you are keeping well as we come to the end of another busy year on the Industrial Relations frontline.
In June the public sector unions triggered section 5.7 of the Building Momentum agreement due to the high inflationary pressures that have evolved over the period of the agreement. Negotiations under the auspices of the WRC culminated with a pay proposal at 6.30am on the 30th August. The proposal was put to ballot late September, early October and was unanimously ratified by the members. The Building Momentum agreement has been extended to the 31st December 2023. Details of the pay adjustments of the agreement are HERE
Under Building Momentum 2020-2022 the working hours were restored to pre HRA hours, i.e. 39 hours per week to 37.5 hours per week. This came info effect from July 1st 2022, however the implementation of the hours is proving problematic in some areas with a very intransigent position been taken by nurse management in these services.
A number of branches were balloted and those areas where no agreement has been reached taking industrial action in the coming weeks to ensure that this breach of Building Momentum is satisfactorily resolved.
Part of the settlement of the 2019/2020 nursing recruitment and retention dispute was the establishment of an Expert Review on Nursing and Midwifery. This group published their 47 recommendations.
The inaugural meeting of the Expert Review Implementation Oversight Team took place in November, some of the recommendations have financial benefits for nurses and others will be challenging.
Once again, we are experiencing a recruitment and retention crisis in both mental health and intellectual disability nursing. This was confirmed following a national survey of branches which revealed over 700 vacancies in the Mental Health Services. Since the decline of the COVID pandemic services are now experiencing a very high level of nurses emigrating to Australia and Canada in particular. Nurses, who were eligible to retire and who stayed on to support services are now retiring. These chronic shortages are happening at a time when there is a significant increase in demand for mental health services post COVID. The PNA highlighted these concerns over a year ago however the Department of Health and HSE failed to address the identified concerns Nothing new there!!
This nursing crisis has so far resulted in the closure of 50% of the CAMHS beds in Linn Dara, Dublin, the closure of 16 beds in St James Hospital also in CHO7 with no indication as to when these beds will re-open. It is inexcusable that nursing vacancies have been allowed to increase to such an extent that beds are being closed and vital services are being denied to these communities.
Following over four years of negotiations, under the auspices of the WRC, the new National Forensic Mental Health Service (NFMHS) Portrane opened last month. Despite this being a state of the art facility this service is also experiencing recruitment and retention issues with over 25 vacancies. This has resulted in only 110 of the 170 beds opening and it will take over 100 more nurses to open the remaining units.
The PNA have called for the establishment of both a National Workforce Planning Group and also Regional Groups to examine and implement innovative and inventive ways of recruiting and retaining nurses. There is a clearly an identified need for subsidised accommodation. Once again, the PNA highlighted this at the outset of NFMHS talks putting on record the need to build staff accommodation on the vast site in Portrane and again this was not taken on board.
When a lot of our nurses are leaving for Australia and Canada, the UK is becoming a less attractive destination. The HSE need to urgently commence a campaign to attract nurses to return from the UK to better our workforce and ease the haemorrhaging.
We have come to the end of a very busy year and we know the coming year be equally busy and challenging.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your commitment and dedication and I wish you all a very happy Christmas
Peter Hughes
General Secretary
You Can View the Chair Persons Address, General Secretary's Address and all Presentations to Conference 2022 Here
