Sir, Your editorial (April 25th) portrays the current Health Workers Dispute as a dispute purely about pay. This is inaccurate. The current pay situation causes major problems for the recruitment and retention of staff in all professions involved in the dispute and this has serious implications for the delivery of essential services to the public. Many of the professions speak of competing with emigration and with private practice in order to attract the brightest and the best health professionals to work within our public health services.
In the case of social workers, one government department competes with another to attract the few social workers that are available to fill the many vacancies. It is a nonsense that the Department of Justice pays Probation and Welfare Officers with the same qualifications £4,000 more at the top of the scale for duties which have been conceded to be comparable.
The result is that there are many social work vacancies within the health services and therefore, long waiting lists for essential services. For instance, there are over 1,000 child care cases awaiting the allocation of a social worker. These include identified cases of child abuse and cases of families under severe pressure. Each year many staff move from the health services to the Probation and Welfare Service for a number of reasons, not least of these a £4,000 pay differential.
Our current pay claim is inextricably linked with the quality of service we can provide to children and families. - Yours, etc,
Cathaoirleach,
National Social Workers
& Community Workers Vocational Group, IMPACT, Nerney Court,
Dublin 1.