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NURSES WORKING IN University Hospital Limerick (UHL) ICU are calling for two beds on the ward to be closed by hospital management on a temporary basis until “suitable qualified” nurses can be recruited.
The nurses, who are members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, are taking part in work-to-rule industrial action, which means that they will only perform duties to the letter of their contract, without taking on additional work.
The INMO said that this is an unprecedented step for these nurses to take, and that they are doing so over deep concerns about “the potential deviation away from one nurse to one patient care in the ICU”.
The INMO further stated that staffing in the UHL ICU is currently operating at a 22% deficit, which means that nearly a quarter of the required nurses are not available on the roster.
Despite this, 100% of the ICU beds on the ward remain open.
INMO Assistant Director of Industrial Relations, Mary Fogarty said that regularly, shifts in the ICU are “significantly depleted”, and that this seems likely to continue.
“The lack of consistent safe staffing in the intensive care unit is having a detrimental impact on the physical and mental wellbeing of our members working in this unit and their patients,” she said.
Fogarty added that the INMO is calling on hospital management to close two of the unit’s beds, until such a time that qualified and experienced nurses are recruited to take up the empty posts in the ICU.
“Unlike other hospitals experiencing similar nursing deficits, management in Limerick have been unwilling to do this thus far,” she said.
Fogarty added that INMO members have not taken the decision to begin work-to-rule lightly, but rather they feel like “all other avenues” to resolve the matter have been closed off by hospital management.
UHL has experienced significant overcrowding this year.
In January of this year a “major internal incident” was announced as the hospital became overwhelmed with patient numbers.
The downgrading of Ennis Hospital, as well as other smaller hospitals in the surrounding areas, has been pointed to by health campaigners and doctors as the key reason for the overcrowding.
The emergency departments in these hospitals were closed over a decade ago, when the UHL emergency department was expanded.
A pilot project to alleviate the impact of overcrowding at UHL was launched in January, which saw patients in the midwest being taken directly to Ennis Hospital rather than waiting on a trolley.
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I haven’t even read the article…sometimes i just love to read comments.
Me too brother, or I look at boobies
Why do you link that song all the time?
@ Ben – You know what – I read it and have not a clue what it is all about. So no point trying to predict me.
68.2% isn’t too impressive. Not exactly foolproof is it?
It’s very impressive actually
In other news: Dublin almost find a way to beat Cork.
fMRI studies are usually small – it’s expensive to do & having your head inside a big magnet isn’t much fun. So it’s promising that they found something.
I can predict some peoples choices:
The socialist: Tax the rich!
The right winger: We need more guns and police
The libertarian: its turning in to a nanny state, stay out of our business
Many people are predictable and a lot make decisions based on their own prejudices and on very little information. So I can see this working a lot.
I was waiting to see how long somebody would make a tenuous link between this article and the government, looks like we have a new record
The subjects chose between 48 pairs and the scientists predicted what they would choose out of the other two pairs??
I bet if do just as well as the scientists on that 50/50 choice?! :)
Why do people waste money on pointless research like this when people are dying from cancer and other disases every day,get your priorites right
Well done Gavin, that’s definitely the most ignorant thing I’ve read all day
Clearly you havent done much reading today so.
I read a few tabloids but your comment still came out on top.
Calling research pointless just because you can’t see any immediate benefit is narrow minded and plain ignorant. If attitudes like yours dictated the direction of scientific research we would not have the kind of technology we do today. For example take space exploration, it seems fairly useless to the average person but the robotic technology developed to build pointless space probes is now being used in hospitals for robotic surgery.
The benefits of research are not always immediately apparent and benefits can arise in unexpected ways. Slating research as pointless is short sighted and ridiculous.
There have been experiments conductef that show decisions are made in the brain before we become consciously aware of them. Kind of puts a dent in the assumption that we all have free will.
If you are talking about Libet’s experiment then 1) He never claimed his findings opposed the existence of free will and 2) Recent experiments call in to question the assumptions made from his findings
You are right Alan ,I knew you say that
they could start with the td in the dail
Minority Report.
They haven’t decided if they have found it yet
“I am Jeremy Kyles wet dream”, national geographic September edition.
There’s a Marcus de Sautoy doc’ on Youtube called “The Secret of Me” which shows this experiment. They could predict decisions 6 sec before he made them, freaky.
have your say