THE head of the Royal College of Nursing in the North of Ireland has said that she would be extremely concerned for the safety of any relative who would be admitted to hospital under the current circumstances and called for politicians to return to the Executive to deliver for patients.
 
RCN’s Rita Devlin was speaking to the Andersonstown News as her members enter a period of industrial action which is expected to culminate in strikes on 15 and 20 December.
 
“Currently in Northern Ireland we are almost 3,000 nurses short of what we should have,” she said.

“There is currently around one-in-10 posts vacant and as a result of that our nurses are working in wards where they feel at times the staffing levels are unsafe, they are being asked to work harder, do more and do better to deliver a failure-free performance.
 
“The stress on the nurses would be the worst that I have seen. I can’t think of a time where the morale has been lower, the stress has been higher and post-covid our nurses are burnt out.”
 
Rita told us that her members feel undervalued as they are the worst paid nurses in the UK.

“We didn’t get the pay review body award which was awarded to England and Wales. Nurses in Scotland are already paid much more than we are,” she continued.
 
“It has been a perfect storm for us at the moment which can be demonstrated by the strength of our ballot for strike action and the thing for us in the RCN is that we have been predicting that things would go this way for at least the last 10 years. It was signposted and people didn’t do enough.
 
“We now find nurses working agency shifts to try and make ends meet. Beforehand our nurses would have done an extra couple of shifts coming up to Christmas or the holidays to get a bit of extra money, now they are having to do them to live as in real terms our nurses are 20 per cent less well-off than they were ten years ago.”

When it comes to the reliance on agency staff, a recent survey by the RCN and the Department of Health found that nursing staff wanted to see safe staffing levels, greater pay and greater flexibility.
 
“The thing that agency offers is pay and flexibility,” she continued. “However, the issue with that is that if you are heavily reliant on agency nursing as we are now, that has a knock-on effect on patient safety.
 
“We have people coming into our wards who are working agency. There is nothing wrong with those workers, but the fact is they do not know the patients and they are not part of the team.
 
“The more that nurses feel undervalued then they will turn increasingly to agency.”

Rita said that she is very concerned about patient safety and called on the government to do more to support our health workers.
 
“It is a shameful indictment both of our local government and Westminster that we have nurses once again having to take to the streets to get a pay rise.
 
“Two years ago they were being applauded for working through covid, for giving up their own safety to look after patients. Two years later they are having to go on the streets again to get a pay rise.
 
“The anger among our nurses is palpable. There is also a strong anger around their inability to deliver the level of care that they want to deliver.
 
“No one goes into nursing to be rich but you do go in to get a decent pay. It is hard, physical work, psychologically it is hard.
 
“Throughout covid our nurses did things that they should never have had to do but they stepped up, they turned up and now they are on the streets again because they are not worth a fair pay rise which is very demoralising.”

In recent weeks we have seen our hospitals making public appeals for available nursing staff to come in to work as staffing levels have been dangerously low. Rita told us that wards are full to capacity and that patients are requiring a lot of care.
 
“These patients are very ill. They are vulnerable and they require a lot of care. There is no let-up in the amount of work or how hard it is.
 
“I went into an ED department two weeks ago and there were 64 patients waiting on trolleys. The nurses are trying to do the normal Emergency Department work and they are trying to deal with areas full of patients which were never set up to look after patients.
 
“Patients who would have been admitted to wards are now being looked after in the Emergency Department.”

Rita said that when she was in the Emergency Department, staff were stressed, and she was concerned for patient safety.
 
“I want to make it very clear that we have some of the best nurses, some of the best doctors and health care staff in the UK. At the minute the service works despite some of the things we see and hear but there is only so long that that pressurised environment can continue before they are burnt out.
 
“My concern now is for our staff and their health and wellbeing. They do the best they can to look after their patients, but I would be concerned for my family if they were to become ill at the minute.”
 
Speaking about the upcoming industrial action, Rita called on any patient who was able to, to come and stand on the picket line with the nurses.
 
“I would hope that patients understand why we have been forced to take this action and I would hope they will come and stand with us on the picket lines to send a clear message to our local politicians and the politicians in Westminster that they are supportive of us getting a better health service because they deserve better than they are getting.”

When it came to the impact of a lack of an Executive, Rita called on parties to return to the table and deliver.
 
“The last time that we went on strike there was no Executive. On day three or four we got the Executive back. The difference between having a health minister and not is huge.
 
“Decisions can be made. We can go to the Health Committee and ask them to bring forward areas of concern. The difference between having an Executive and not having one is huge because they can make decisions.
 
“With the best will in the world, our civil servants can only make the decisions they are allowed to make which is a very narrow scope.
 
“Our politicians need to get back into some form of government and start looking after the people of this country properly."