David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome all our witnesses and pass on my best wishes to all of those operating on the front line in very difficult and challenging circumstances. I will make a few points and then put a few questions to a number of witnesses. All of the opening statements made for very difficult listening and should be for all of us but there is a very clear relationship between the burnout facing front-line staff and low morale on the one hand and the lack of capacity across the system, the failure to deal with the two-tier pay inequality issues that have been in play for a long time and the lack of supports in terms of occupational health on the other. If we do not sort out these problems, we will lose more nurses, doctors, consultants and front-line staff. It is as simple as that. Student nurses and midwives have been campaigning for the past number of months - years in fact. The public health specialists have pay demands, as do hospital consultants operating on lower two-tier contracts, so we need to sort out all of these issues.

I will make a number of points about occupational health. It is outrageous to learn from the opening statements that there is no serial testing for front-line staff in hospitals. If there is any place to use testing to hunt down the virus, it should be the front line in hospitals. I cannot believe that serial testing is not being done or is only being done when there is an outbreak. The fact that the roll-out of the vaccine has been haphazard and did not follow the infection rates is deeply troubling, as is the fact that there have been very few inspections by the Health and Safety Authority. I make all of these points because staff are exhausted and facing burnout, their morale is low, they want us to fix these problems and they are facing into what, in my view, will be a tsunami of missed care that must be caught up with in the time ahead. We cannot expect all of those people who have been through very difficult circumstances with all of the challenges they faced over the past year to face into all of that catch-up care if we do not support them.

Ms Ní Sheaghdha stated that the lack of routine testing and monitoring for exposed nurses, midwives and other front-line workers had exposed them to a greater risk of infection. She said that, put simply, if we cannot see a problem, we cannot deal with it. What was the response of the HSE when told by the INMO that serial testing was not happening? We should bear in mind that over 50% of front-line staff who have been infected with Covid have been nurses and healthcare assistants, mostly women. What was the response of the HSE when the INMO raised issues relating to testing?