Mr. Peter Hughes:

Between 1,500 and 2,000 nurses are needed to implement A Vision for Change. Our research has shown that only 30% of the report was implemented but 76% of the beds were taken out of the service. We have minimal community services and I am again alluding to Dr. Moore's area. This is where we have a problem. We have overcapacity and patients are sleeping on mattresses and chairs at night. This is totally unacceptable. If a 24-7 community service was developed, this would not be happening. I believe A Vision for Change and its predecessor, Planning for the Future, were used as cost-saving methods to take beds out of the mental health service. No nurse ever objected to the beds coming out of the system but we wanted community services. We wanted an alternative to hospital admissions and this has not happened. Now we have a serious nursing crisis.

We have a complex and convoluted recruitment system and where are the nurses? They are in the UK, Australia and Canada, where they get far more pay, far better terms and conditions and far better places to work. The stress nurses must endure to go into services that are underresourced, understaffed and overcrowded is very frightening. It is a crisis at present but it will be exacerbated. There are 24,000 vacant nursing positions in the UK, and the WHO has stated that because of the bilateral agreement we have with the UK, Brexit will mean we will lose more nurses to the UK. It will come looking for our nurses even more that it does at that present because it will not be able to take other EU nurses. The bilateral agreement with Ireland will allow this. This situation will become totally intolerable.