It is a time for cool heads and wise counsel in the nursing profession. The Labour Court has handed down a sensible and sympathetic judgment to the salary issues upon which it was asked to adjudicate. It is a judgment which is in striking contrast to the unsympathetic and far-from-common-sense proposals which were made by the Minister, Mr Cowen, just after the independent Commission on Nursing issued its report. He wanted the pay-related elements of the commission's report dealt with in the context of public service pay mechanisms. The court, recognising the radical changes in nursing practice detailed in the report, has distinguished between public service pay in general and particular changes in nurses' pay which arise, or may arise, from the implementation of the commission's recommendations.
It has recommended that the amount paid by way of allowances recognising additional qualifications or specialisations held and practised by nurses be increased from just over £300 to sums ranging from £1,000 to £1,500 per annum where appropriate. This recommendation has been estimated to affect between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of the 20,000 nurses working in the public service. But the court has not made specific recommendations on the other claims submitted for judgment by the nurses' unions. Rather, it has recommended that, because the pay issues involved in these claims can only be realistically resolved when the other recommendations of the commission's report concerning career paths and restructuring of the profession are agreed, the Nursing Alliance and the Health Service Employers must start to negotiate the implementation of the report.
The court has also indicated that these negotiations should have a deadline of May 1st, when the parties would return to the court for further consideration. This could serve to concentrate the minds of the negotiators and reduce to a minimum the procrastination and prevarication that have dogged much of the negotiation between the nursing unions and their managements for more than a decade. The court reports that it is conscious of the lack of trust between nurses and management based on perceived delays in completing negotiations in the past and previous failures to establish the commission despite earlier commitments given. In short, it can better decide on pay entitlements when it knows what new nursing structures have been agreed, and the negotiators should get on with it.
Meanwhile, the nurses are left in doubt yet again, and grassroots members may well feel aggrieved and angry again. But there is a limit set now on the duration of this delay, and their union officers feel, as does the Labour Court, that progress can, and should, be made by May. The understandable anger must be contained until the court can be given a clearer idea of exactly what it is being asked to adjudicate upon and what nurses will be doing in the new structures that the commission has recommended. Some individual nurses will surely feel that they are in a dilemma, caught between their prolonged and justifiable anger and the possibility of a resolution to their longstanding problems. They must hold off any industrial expression of that anger and encourage both unions and management to get on with the task of urgent and realistic negotiations.