Doctors bid to force payment of accommodation allowance

Non-consultant hospital doctors are to begin a new legal initiative aimed at forcing the health service to reintroduce a €3,100 accommodation allowance which was abolished by the Government in 2012.

The allowance was paid to interns, senior house officers and registrars in cases where their hospitals did not provide accommodation to facilitate on-call duties. If successful, the move could cost the Government about €10 million. However the developments will be watched carefully by other groups such as recently recruited gardaí who have also been denied broadly similar allowances.

The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) has argued that the living-out allowance was set out in a contract of employment for non-consultant hospital doctors, which itself formed part of a High Court settlement agreed between the IMO and the HSE in 2010 to end a dispute at the time. The IMO has contended the HSE is in breach of this High Court settlement.

Doctors who were in employment in the appropriate grades at the time of the abolition of the living-out allowance in 2012 were permitted to retain the €3,182 annual payment.

Industrial relations

However, the IMO has argued that in the interim, most of these would have worked their way through the hospital system and there would now be very few doctors still receiving the money.

The IMO has contended that by failing to make the payment of the living-out allowance, the HSE is in breach of the High Court settlement. It has argued that it initially sought to have the issue resolved through normal industrial relations processes.

A spokeswoman for the IMO said: “This is another example of the HSE breaching contracts and failing to honour legally binding commitments.

"Given the attitude of the HSE," the spokeswoman added, "it is little wonder that non-consultant hospital doctors are leaving Ireland to go to work abroad in health systems that value their skills and honour contractual agreements."

The Garda Representative Association last year expressed concern that newly qualified gardaí, who were taken on as part of the recent recruitment drive, were struggling to afford accommodation as the Government had scrapped rent allowance of about €4,000 a year.

Meanwhile, Minister for Health Leo Varadkar will today launch a new method for calculating the optimum number of nurses to work on wards in public hospitals. About €2 million has been allocated to pay for a pilot project in a number of hospitals to operate the new approach in one or more of their wards.