Dear Colleagues,
I hope you are all well as we come to the end of another busy year. Despite the successful conclusion of the public service pay talks in the early part of the year with pay increases of 4.25% this year, 3% in 2025, i.e. 2% from the 1st of March, 1% from the 1st of August, and a further 2% in 2026. The past 12 months have been dominated by the imposition of the HSE recruitment embargo in November 2023 and its successor, the pay and numbers strategy.
The PNA strongly urged the HSE to exempt mental health services from the embargo taking into consideration the magnitude of the staffing crisis in the services and the impact on patients, families, and the wider community. Incredibly, the HSE declined to exempt mental health services, and refused to acknowledge the historical deficits that the service was already suffering from.
In July, the embargo was lifted and replaced with the Pay and Numbers Strategy. Since the lifting of the embargo, there has been minimal recruitment of psychiatric nurses into the services, except for the 2024 graduates.
Indeed, the recruitment of our very own graduates was only achieved after a concerted effort by PNA. Despite the assurance in February 2024 by the National Director of Human Resources that all new graduates would be offered permanent contracts of employment, PNA was forced into the position of embarking on industrial action in Mayo and Galway/Roscommon to ensure that these highly qualified graduates were recruited to assist with the staffing crisis.
The recruitment of the graduates was eventually resolved in all services throughout the country.
The reality of the Pay and Numbers Strategy is that it is a blunt instrument which could effectively wipe out over 700 vacant psychiatric nursing posts in mental health.
The current level of staff shortages has left services hugely reliant on overtime and agency to maintain basic services and is severely impacting on service development, which is contrary to Sharing the Vision,the government’s mental health strategy.
With this level of staff shortages our members are burned out, frustrated, and fed up with continuously holding services together with minimum resources.
PNA’s own research earlier this year revealed that numerous services are carrying vacancies of between 20% to 30%. This situation is unsustainable if we are to meet the growing and complex demands for mental health services.
As regards the 700 nursing vacances, under its Pay and Numbers Strategy the HSE will insist that no one was in these posts at the time of the instigation of the strategy on December 31st, 2023. However, the reality is that these posts are currently filled through overtime, agency, and retired staff.
We are extremely concerned that the Pay and Numbers Strategy, incorporating a huge reduction in staffing numbers, will result in the closure of adult and CAMHS services and a severe curtailment of community services. For example, the 11 beds in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS)in Linn Dara, temporarily closed in 2022, will never re-open and every county in Ireland will see the reduction of services and the prospect of staffing the new CAMHS unit in the new children’s hospital is very bleak.
We believe that mental health services have been largely abandoned and excluded from staffing increases over the last five years. This view is supported by the fact that of the additional 23,000 staff employed in the HSE between 2019-2024, psychiatric nurses equated to less than 1% of these.
As you are aware, we have a mandate to take industrial action in relation to this unacceptable response to the obvious recruitment and retention crisis in the mental health services. We are engaging with the HSE under the auspices of the WRC to resolve this matter. The three main aspects of these engagements are the recruitment of our new graduates, the non-payment of temporary hire appointments during the embargo, the level of vacancies in mental health services and the ramifications of the pay and numbers strategy.
As outlined earlier the graduate recruitment issue has been resolved.
78 of 133 temporary hire appointments have been approved for payment. We have requested that those who are approved for payments are notified and we strongly advise anyone who has been on a temporary hire appointment for 84 days or more to invoke the grievance procedure, your local PNA representative will assist you with this.
In relation to vacancies and the pay and numbers strategy the HSE are unable to provide us the numbers of whole time equivalents of Psychiatric Nurses for each Regional Health Area (RHA). They have provided us with the whole time equivalent numbers of all mental health staff per RHA but not specific for mental health nursing. It is imperative that mental health services are prioritised in each RHA to safeguard services and staff instead of impeding the recruitment and retention of nurses in mental health services. The HSE need to put measures in place to maximise the recruitment and retention of Psychiatric Nurses to maintain and develop services. This must be a priority otherwise we will be left with no option but to commence industrial action in the very near future.
I would like to finish by reminding you of some key dates for your diary. Our Annual Delegate Conference takes place on the 3RD & 4TH of April in the Castlecourt Hotel Westport and the Horatio Congress will take place on the 15th&16th of May in Berlin.
