Health employers 'threat to industrial peace'

Nurses face professional difficulties that warrant industrial action but this has been deferred out of respect to the Sustaining Progress pay deal, it was claimed today.

Delegates at the Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) annual meeting in Killarney heard that health service employers are "the greatest threat to industrial peace in the health service" because they have failed to implement agreements and "binding third party determinations".

Addressing delegates, INO deputy General secretary, Mr Dave Hughes, said nurses would not tolerate indefinitely failure to resolve difficulties facing members.

Pointing out that industrial peace costs money, Mr Hughes said bedlam persists in accident and emergency departments nationwide while care of the elderly is inadequately staffed.

Mr Hughes said no industrial action has been taken despite "the gross, unsustainable anomaly which has seen the pay of unqualified childcare workers in the intellectual disability sector" pass out nurses working with, and in some cases, supervising.

There was also the "injustice of public health nurses being paid a lower salary scale than all other clinical nurse specialists and the refusal of the Labour Court to grant a 35-hour-week to nurses and midwives on the basis that it was prohibited under Sustaining Progress", said Mr Hughes.

Delegates were told that despite commitments under the national agreement, no issue could be resolved locally and "employers have refused to attend the LRC and Rights Commissioner Hearings".

An alternative approach to managing the health services was suggested by the Fine Gael spokesperson on health, Ms Olivia Mitchell, who spoke at the conference.

She told delegates the State was spending €11 billion a year on health, a figure which had to rise 10 per cent a year just to maintain the current level of service.

Ms Mitchell said the State needed to withdraw from the position of providing all services and all personnel. She suggested instead that the State should purchase services from competing insurance companies who in turn would source these services from competing healthcare providers.