Psychiatric nurse recruitment embargo
Deputy Bacik warned that psychiatric nurses were taking industrial action over the HSE recruitment embargo and said mental health services were in a dire state. The Minister said the Government was serious about expanding services and acknowledged pressures caused by the hiring pause.
The Psychiatric Nurses Association of Ireland, PNAI, has given the HSE three weeks’ notice of industrial action over the scandalous recruitment embargo that was introduced last November. The PNAI has a membership of between 6,500 and 7,000 people, 95% of whom voted for this. At the time the embargo was imposed, there were approximately 300 vacancies for psychiatric nurses in this country and there are now a shocking 725 vacancies. Mental healthcare in Ireland is in a terrible state, with spending on mental health being far too low. Child and adolescent mental health services continue to make headlines for all the wrong reasons, with far too many children and young people falling through the gaps. How does the Minister propose to address this chronic shortfall in psychiatric staffing? How does he propose to address the impact the recruitment embargo has had? When will he lift that embargo to ensure we have the level of staffing in the health service, particularly in the area of mental healthcare, that is so badly needed?
Comment on this
I thank the Deputy for her question. I pay tribute to the work that our psychiatric nurses do right across this country. This Government, including myself and the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, is deadly serious about the expansion of mental health services. The budget in that regard has increased by several hundred million euro in the lifetime of this Government.
I will be the first to acknowledge that our front-line clinicians are experiencing pressures because of the pause on hiring. It is worth remembering that the pause only came in because the HSE, having been funded to hire a record 6,000 extra staff last year, in fact hired 8,000. We can see that reflected in the number of psychiatric nurses. I encourage the Psychiatric Nurses Association of Ireland to engage with the HSE, use the industrial mechanisms of the State and not to start with actions that would curtail services for patients but to instead engage with the relevant industrial relations mechanisms. In comparison with last October when the embargo was introduced, there are now 175 more psychiatric nurses in place. Even during the embargo, the psychiatric nursing workforce has increased.