Hopes that an early date would be set for talks between health service employers and the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) on reducing junior doctors' working hours have been dashed following a row between the parties.
The chief executive of the Health Service Employers' Agency, Mr Gerard Barry, yesterday questioned the commitment of the IMO to reducing the doctors' working hours after it said it would not enter talks until hospitals which had introduced rosters for junior doctors without first agreeing them with the IMO withdrew them.
Mr Barry said the IMO wanted every non-consultant hospital doctor to be paid overtime for all hours worked outside 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Thursday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Fridays.
"This would mean 129 hours out of every 168 hours in the week would have to be covered by overtime. If we agreed to roster every doctor between those hours it would increase the already heavy dependency of hospitals on overtime and inflate an already huge overtime bill which is running at over €200 million a year. That is what it is designed to do," he said.
"The whole problem with the IMO strategy is that as a first step to try and reduce overtime, they would actually increase it. This strategy raises serious questions over what their real intention is."
Mr Barry said the IMO was perfectly entitled to argue its points when talks began but it was disingenuous of it to set this point as a precondition for talks at the Labour Relations Commission.
"People are asking where all the money is going in the health service. It's going on pay and if the IMO has its way even more will go on pay," Mr Barry said.
The hours of non-consultant hospital doctors must be reduced to 58 hours a week by next August to comply with a new European Working Time Directive. A framework for doing so was outlined in the recently-published Hanly report.
"Time is not on our side now and there should be no question of us losing more time before getting into talks," Mr Barry said.
The IMO's director of industrial relations, Mr Fintan Hourihan, said he completely rejected the implications of Mr Barry's attack. "I would think it a bit rich that now we are subject to this public onslaught when for years the HSEA sat on its hands in relation to reducing the overtime of junior doctors," he said.
"I do not think they are in a position to lecture the IMO." Furthermore, it was nonsensical to suggest doctors should be paid the same for working at 3 p.m. as at 3 a.m., he said.
He denied the IMO was setting preconditions for talks at the LRC. "All we are doing is insisting on good industrial relations practice. If there are changes in the hours doctors work or their conditions of employment, there needs to be agreement and we have not been consulted about changes to rosters in 10 to 12 hospitals. We have asked that standard rosters be restored before we go back to the LRC."
Meanwhile, a mass meeting of IMO members will be convened on November 8th to discuss the Hanly report. The national council of the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association will discuss it on the same day. Both unions will not respond to a HSEA invitation to talks on renegotiating the contracts of hospital consultants until after those meetings.