Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We have had an issue here all along with the retention and recruitment of staff. I cannot get my head around that problem. If we have people who are qualified to fill posts but we cannot employ them directly, yet we can sublet them to another company and pay them more to do the exact same job for which they are qualified, therefore, what is the problem? I cannot understand it. A photo and message was uploaded by a psychiatric nurse to Facebook, which shows how toxic the situation is. That message came from four psychiatric nurses during the weekend. It states:

This is a picture of 4 Psychiatric nurses who had to work to work because being psychiatric nurses we are bottom of the pile in regard to lifts by emergency personnel, because for some unfortunate reason people must think, people's mental health goes away when the snow comes! ...

Or maybe we are not seen as "real nurses".

As a newly qualified nurse I've learned so much already about the country and how we are valued.

But STILL, We put on our boots and WALK to work.

THESE ARE THE KIND OF NURSES YOU ARE LOSING TO OTHER COUNTRIES!!

That is a statement from psychiatric nurses. They went public with that message. We are paying agency staff more money and they probably have less responsibility than full-time staff. I can understand the gap in terms of pensions and so on but it comes back to the issue of the recruitment and retention of staff. We are wasting money on agency staff when we could be giving it to people who have spent their time here qualifying and want to work in the system because we recognise that it is not all about money. When staff feel they have no self-worth in the system, we cannot fix that problem. If we keep subletting these qualified personnel and privatising the service, we will have a dog chasing its tail for the rest of his life. We will be dead and buried and another committee will be in here asking the same questions.

How do we fix that problem? Are the unions responsible for this or does it come down to the contracts? Do the personnel have bad contracts? This issue is very frustrating. I was a member of the Committee on the Future of Healthcare, which deliberated for 12 months, and this same issue has come up again. We are wasting money left, right and centre. Is it €2 million a week that is spent on HSE agency staff?