Four ambulance controllers have sick pay cut despite doctors’ certificates

FOUR ambulance controllers are facing a bleak Christmas after health service bosses cut off their sick pay.

The Dublin-based controllers, who are aged between 40 and 45 and married with young children, have been on sick leave due to work-related stress for the last two months.

Their condition has been certified as genuine by their own GPs and by the Health Services Executive’s (HSE) occupational health doctor.

Dr Paul Heslin, who is dealing with three of the controllers, said they had been abandoned without pay after more than 38 years of combined service to the community.

“The HSE is willing to waste €120 million on computer systems but will not support these staff who are vulnerable, two weeks before Christmas,” he said.

The HSE has the discretion to pay the men their wages after their 12 weeks of statutory sick leave expired but has chosen not to do so.

The controllers are part of a 14-strong HSE team working in the ambulance command and control centre in Townsend Street in Dublin. They are responsible for dispatching ambulances to routine calls but also to life-or-death situations such as cardiac arrests.

Dr Heslin said the men’s workplace environment had affected their psychological safety and physical health.

He said the HSE needed to immediately put the men back on full pay and acknowledge the enormous distress they were suffering.

“The HSE need to work with them and the doctors to create a healthy, reasonable and supportive working environment, not have them actively undermined by their own management and support team.”

The SIPTU Dublin hospitals’ branch secretary Paul Bell said he could confirm that four ambulance controllers were off work and that there were issues about their sick pay and their work environment but said he could not comment on individual cases.

The problems at the command and control centre, which is manned by separate controllers from the HSE and the Dublin Fire Brigade, were highlighted last year in a report by management consultant Conal Devine.

He found that patients were being put at risk by the lack of a single system for dispatching all emergency ambulances in Dublin and recommended an immediate health and safety audit of staff and the public.

But the report, which was supposed to be binding, was never published and HSE managers are only now talking about the possibility of carrying out the health and safety audit.

According to a HSE source, the report has been abandoned and a working group has been set up between the HSE and Dublin City Council to examine the issue all over again.

A HSE spokesman could not comment on the issue.