Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I was recently speaking to a nurse who moved to London and the big change she saw working in London was that, no matter what day she worked in a hospital, there was a set ratio of senior nurses to junior nurses. She had worked in a unit where there were 20 nurses. One day, there would be two senior nurses and 18 junior nurses or nurses qualified within the last two years. The next day, she would come in and there would be eight senior nurses and 12 junior nurses. The problem when there were only two senior nurses was that there was a big logjam in the system. There does not seem to be a planned approach to having the same ratio across the service from one end of the week to the next.