If a private business found that its operations could not be run efficiently with the number of workers it employed, the obvious thing would be to hire more workers. If, however, it found out that its competitor’s output was as high, but it had a smaller workforce, it would examine the way it was operating and try to find out the reasons for this discrepancy. The most obvious explanation is inefficiency – it does not make good use of its human resources.

It would take a good look at its processes, how work was organised, the performance of each worker, the resources it was using, its suppliers and, based on this, decide actions it could take to become more efficient and therefore more profitable. It may have to make workers redundant, offer those who stay incentives to work harder, it could invest in labour-saving equipment or move workers from one part of the business to another.

In the public sector, the answer to inefficiencies and all organisational and operational problems is to hire more workers. There is never any other solution, even though everyone knows that the overwhelming majority of public sector organisations and departments are overstaffed. But because efficiency is so low, the only way to increase output is by hiring more staff. From time to time we hear claims that the courts, the schools, the police, the hospitals, ministry departments are understaffed and need more workers to provide a decent service.

Unions representing the workers of public hospitals are always protesting about staff shortages, which they claim put lives at risk. Under pressure from the doctors’ union, because many hospital doctors had left, Okypy not only increased pay but it also hired many more. Now, it appears, it is the turn of the hospital nurses to claim staff shortages and demand their numbers are increased. Hospital nurses union Pasyno said on Tuesday that its general assemblies authorised the union executive to take industrial action because “the situation is at its limits.” Nurses in hospitals, the ambulance service and special health units could not cope, the union claimed. The nurse shortage remained unsolved and was putting nurses under increased pressure, it added.

In the case of the public hospitals, the problem is not understaffing but inefficiency, poor management and, worst of all, restrictive practices imposed over the years by the unions. The absurdity of having civil service hours, for example, should be scrapped, and a shift system introduced; the regulations stipulating the number of nurses for specific jobs, departments, wards cause the inefficiencies. It defies belief that public hospitals operate with three nurses per bed compared to one per bed in private hospitals.

In a rational world, nurses’ representatives would have sat down with Okypy management and worked out ways to make public hospitals more efficient – for which there is plenty of room – so that nurses do not feel under pressure. But first the union-imposed restrictions must end.