Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Good. Fair play to you, Minister.

I support the motion. The case of Aoife Johnston, her tragic and unavoidable death, should be a wake-up call for everybody. Something like that should not have happened. It is absolutely tragic and no doubt linked to massive overcrowding and the fact that she was left on a trolley for 13 hours without the medication she needed to save her life. Her life almost certainly could have been saved with that medication, without that overcrowding and without that chaos in the emergency department. It is an indictment of our health service that something like that can happen.

I am acutely aware that, week in, week out, the crisis in the emergency department in UHL is raised. From my point of view, the arguments that are made in this motion are eerily similar to the arguments that were made when St. Michael's Hospital and Loughlinstown hospital emergency departments were downgraded, supposedly as part of a project to develop a centre of excellence in St. Vincent's Hospital as part of a hospital group. All that has happened since is that, on a regular, ongoing basis, St. Vincent's faces a similar crisis of people left for hours and hours, and sometimes days, on trolleys. It happens regularly. The project has not worked.

The point I want to make to the Minister before he goes is that, while I am not a health spokesperson and do not, week in, week out, deal with him on the details of what is going on in the health service, I am very aware that the Government announced a lifting of the recruitment embargo in July of this year. Health workers had said the embargo was seriously inhibiting their ability to recruit the staff they needed in understaffed hospitals and other areas of our health service. Over recent weeks, unprompted, I started to get a series of desperate phone calls from staff members of all different grades in St. Michael's Hospital. They said the staff were utterly demoralised and patient safety was being seriously compromised in St. Michael's Hospital, that people were being pulled from one place into places they should not really be in order to fill gaps in every area of the hospital, that physios were not available for people on the wards or were being pulled from one place to another and that there were problems among the staff in catering, nursing and so on, people panicked and demoralised and saying that, despite their understanding that there was a lifting of the recruitment embargo, an effective embargo, a staff ceiling or staff quota, called the pay and numbers strategy, had in fact been imposed in June. I had not heard about this.

I have raised this with the Minister. He is saying we have to have some kind of control on recruitment and all the rest of it. I heard the same issue from the National Rehabilitation Hospital, NRH, when I attended the opening of the new wing. I said to the people in the NRH I had been hearing about this pay and numbers strategy in St. Michael’s Hospital and the impact it is having on staff and patient safety. When I asked the people in the NRH about this, they said it is exactly the same there. I phoned the INMO to ask whether its representatives had heard about the pay and numbers strategy. They said they had and it was endangering patient safety across the health service. An embargo by another name is being imposed under the pay and numbers strategy, whereby ceilings have been put on recruitment based on who was in post in December 2023.

I was absolutely shocked when I heard about a particular case. I met the representative of the public health nurses in my area at the INMO briefing and she said there were a significant number – I think she said 11 but the Minister can correct me if I am wrong – of community public health nurse posts which had not been filled at that point and have now just gone. They have just gone. This is the impact of the strategy. This is happening in St. Michael’s Hospital and elsewhere. This is absolutely crazy. Arbitrary staff quotas and ceilings are being imposed with the consequence that patient safety is being seriously endangered and the workforce in the hospitals is absolutely demoralised. I cannot overstate how demoralised the workforce is. We are organising a public meeting, which the Minister or a representative of his is welcome to attend, in our area in the next couple of weeks to discuss this, prompted by the concern, demoralisation and panic of the workers in the hospital.

I was contacted by people in St. Luke’s Hospital who have asked me to ask the Minister directly whether he is going to act on the national radiation therapist review report and recommendations. They say huge numbers of machines, scanners and other equipment to treat cancer are sitting idle and not being used across the country, including in St. Luke’s Hospital, because of lack of staffing, due to staff quotas or whatever being imposed. We cannot endanger patient safety by arbitrary staff quotas, ceilings, embargoes or whatever name you want to put on them. Staffing has to be based on patient safety.

See this speech in context