Mr. Liam Doran:

The latitude of the Chairman knows no bounds. A delicate line must be walked and we come before the committee today with no industrial relations perspective on this issue. We will deal with industrial relations and the ins and outs of the Haddington Road agreement in time but this is not an industrial relations matter for the INMO and it will not be solved through traditional industrial relations methods on disputes. This is about the quality of care people receive at 6 a.m., 2 p.m. and 11 p.m. Will the right person bein situ to look after the needs of those people? We will not turn this into an industrial relations dispute because we must turn the ship around through professional persuasion and so on.
All nurses and midwives are obliged to work 1.5 extra hours under this agreement and they are doing so in a manner that was agreed by local management. The new rosters are in place since 1 July 2013 and they have been implemented in a mixture of ways but local management has been involved and everyone is working the extra man hours.
On the issue of HIQA and trolley count, trolley count is a form of measurement that is issued by us every day and is accepted by the HSE and the Department of Health. I believe the system has been anaesthetised so that it is difficult now to understand the plight of individual people. Some 5,900 people were on trolleys in the first four months of this year and this is down 15% on last year, which is good. It is down 24% on the figure from two years ago and that is even better. However, this year's figure is up 27% on that pertaining to 2007, when trolley overcrowding was called a national emergency. I make this point only to show that everything is relative. We made these points with regard to the emergency department, ED, in Limerick every year from 2005 to 2012, inclusive. We welcome the latest HIQA report but why did it take so long to address an area that is patently unsafe for patients and staff and is replicated in other emergency departments around the country?