UCC SONM 25 Year Book

UCC / School of Nursing and Midwifery

NATIONAL CONTEXT- ECONOMIC CRISIS

The year 2008 marked a profound crisis for Irish public services, with the economy moving from a state of ‘boom’ to ‘bust’ and back again. The economic crisis which unfolded in 2008 saw a substantial reduction in core funding to the Higher Education sector. In 2008 the HSE through the Nursing Services Director communicated with UCC (Mr. Diarmuid Collins, Chief Financial Officer/Bursar) that “adjustments” were being made to the “Pre-Registration Nursing Degree Programmes provided by your institution [UCC]”. These adjustments related to a cut in undergraduate students numbers i.e. General Nursing was reduced by 35 places, Intellectual Disability Nursing by 5 places, Psychiatric Nursing reduced by 10 places. In total this meant the number of students recruited each year into the undergraduate nursing programme was cut by 50. These factors combined with a moratorium in recruitment proved challenging for the School of Nursing and Midwifery. The School had to actively increase non exchequer funding through increased enrollments and other activities. Simultaneously within the health services spending was reduced resulting in an employment moratorium, salary cuts, increased working hours and incentivised retirement schemes. In an attempt to address the increasing numbers of newly qualified nurses leaving Ireland to work abroad, the HSE implemented a new nurse graduate recruitment initiative in 2013 with limited success. John Wells summarises these changes in his paper-The impact of the economic crisis and austerity on the nursing and midwifery professions in the Republic of Ireland – ‘boom’, ‘bust’ and retrenchment (Wells and White, 2014). Other changes included the launch of Health Information Quality Agency (HIQA) in 2007 and the restructuring of the hospital service (Higgins Report (DoH&C, 2013) and the launch of the National Patient Safety Office (NPSO) in December 2016. Over this time period a number of reports have been published which draw attention to failings in care delivery within our healthcare system examples include treatment of residents at Leas Cross Nursing Home (DoHC, 2009), the findings from the investigation into the care provided by the HSE to Savita Halappanavar (HIQA, 2013); reports relating to perinatal and midwifery care at Portlaoise General Hospital and other reports into the quality, safety and governance of care at a number of acute hospitals and community services.

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