Hospitals have begun cancelling elective admissions and outpatient appointments for next Wednesday in anticipation of the first one-day strike by non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs).
Meanwhile the largest nursing union, the Irish Nurses' Organisation, has warned the Government that it will begin a series of "tactical" industrial actions from the end of this month if arrears due members since the end of the national nurses' strike last October are not paid.
Delegates to the INO annual conference in Galway also called yesterday on the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, to "intervene directly in the NCHD dispute by publicly guaranteeing adherence to existing contracts".
There were no developments in the doctors' dispute yesterday. The Health Service Employers' Agency said it was available for talks at the Labour Relations Commission. Its director of industrial relations services, Mr James Doran, said valuable time was being wasted at this stage by the refusal of the Irish Medical Organisation to enter talks.
The IMO's director of industrial relations, Mr Fintan Hourihan, said the union was not setting any preconditions to talks at the LRC. It simply required an unequivocal commitment that the contracts of employment would be honoured by health employers.
He reiterated the IMO position that even if a formula could be found for talks to begin at the LRC there was no question of deferring next Wednesday's strike.
At their conference yesterday nurses passed resolutions calling for equal treatment of all health professionals on the issue of overtime pay and for chief executive officers of health boards and hospitals to be made "legally responsible" if they failed to honour contracts with nurses and doctors. The INO general secretary, Mr Liam Doran, said the failure of many hospital managers to pay arrears of allowances, due in some cases since August 1998, was "another illustration of bad practices and explains why we have so much unrest in the health services".
The president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Ms Inez McCormick, told the conference that for too long "rigid hierarchical male medical management structures" had dictated the levels of nurses' capacity to contribute to the health services.
The INO agreed to open exploratory talks with the Psychiatric Nurses' Association on a merger. It said it would support the PNA in efforts to resolve its current dispute over promotional grades with the HSEA. The INO has 25,000 members and the PNA 4,000.