The Irish Health Service has appealed to its emigrant nurses to return home and is offering a relocation package of up to €1,500 to make the move more attractive.
In the past decade, Ireland has seen thousands of skilled individuals leave to find work abroad.
Now the HSE hopes to bring some of those people back home, and has launched a recruitment drive with the aim of filling 500 vacant nursing and midwife posts.
The roles come with a salary of between €27,211 and €43,800, a 39-hour week, public service pension and other benefits.
The HSE would ideally like to fill these positions with Irish citizens, and have some of the country’s top talent return. The relocation package includes the costs of flights and also a year’s nursing registration.
Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation spokesperson estimates that up to 9,000 nurses have left Ireland in the last six years. He told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland: “We are very short of nurses now and we have been lobbying the HSE to have an international recruitment campaign to try and bring people back since the beginning of this year.”
National Director of Human Resources with the HSE Ian Tegerdine also appeared on the show. He said: “Remember during the austerity years when we had the recruitment moratorium, we did not have jobs to offer these people. We sort of forced them out of the country. We are now saying to them things have changed, there is a bit of an upturn in the economic situation and we now do have some jobs.”
The campaign has been given its own website www.nursinginireland.ie and is also being promoted via social media and newspaper articles.