Crisis talks to resolve health union row

CRISIS talks were being held last night to try and overcome opposition by Ireland’s biggest health union to the Government’s health service reform programme.

Industrial action by the union is due to begin on Monday, effectively blocking the transition to a planned new national health service body.

The Health Service Executive (HSE) is due to take over day-to-day running of the service from the State’s health boards from January.

Members of the implementation committee of the HSE met in Dublin with representatives of trade union IMPACT to try and resolve the issues.

But an IMPACT spokesperson said the union was not hopeful that the talks would break the impasse and expected the industrial action to go ahead on Monday.

IMPACT’s members include senior managers and without their co-operation the transition cannot take place, the union says. It claims the existing health boards are being abolished before adequate new structures are in place.

Other health service organisations are equally worried and say rushed reforms risk systems failures. Organisations representing more than 100,000 health staff have said there is a risk of health service systems failures in the transition.

The organisations - the Irish Medical Organisation; the Irish Nurses Organisation, and SIPTU as well as IMPACT - represent the entire spectrum of health workers, including doctors, nurses, health professionals, administrators, ancillaries, and a range of others.

They claim more rigorous safeguards are needed to eliminate risks. They have also raised doubts over public accountability for the €11 billion health budget. None of the four organisations are opposed to the reforms, but they say transition arrangements drawn up by the interim HSE fail to address real risks. The transition arrangements have not been agreed with representatives of clinicians or other health staff.

Fine Gael health spokesperson Dr Liam Twomey said yesterday that the absence of the accountability in the 2004 Health Bill, that gives legislative force to the changes, was deeply disturbing.

“The Tánaiste gave us her word that she was listening but, because this legislation was so rushed, we have not had the views of voluntary groups or professional representatives of health organisations,” said Mr Twomey.

However, Tánaiste and Health Minister Mary Harney rejected claims there would be no accountability in the new HSE.

Ms Harney tabled 50 amendments yesterday to the bill - 30 of which were technical and the majority of the balance were in response to concerns raised by the opposition.

“Most of the amendments focused on strengthening accountability within the new HSE,” Ms Harney’s spokesman added.