Hospital overcrowding impacting nurses' mental health, INMO says

Eva Osborne

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) has said poor working conditions and hospital overcrowding are negatively impacting nurses' mental health.

The union is calling for better psychological and trauma-informed support for healthcare staff and for legislation to protect hospital staffing levels.

Burnout, wellbeing, and mental resilience are among the topics being discussed at the INMO's annual conference in Dundalk this week.

The union's director of professional services, Tony Fitzpatrick, said nurses regularly report working in understaffed wards.

"We need safe staffing. We have the frameworks but now, and the INMO has been calling for this, it's time that it's legislated," he said.

"That when a midwife goes to work, when a nurse goes to work, they know that they're working in a safe environment where they have adequate staff to provide safe care.

"But unfortuntely that's continuously underminded by fiscal emergencies within the Health Service Executive and that impacts then where directors of nursing have to go through multiple layers of management in order to get nursing and midwifery posts secured."

Fitzpatrick also said that the number of patients on hospital trolleys is unacceptable.

"It's incredible that over the last 10 years more than 1 million people have spent time on a trolley waiting for a hospital bed," he said.

"It's completely unacceptable that we continue to see this problem on an annual basis.

"And the most concerning part is we have members that are reporting moral distress because they're working in this environment on a continuous basis."