HSE warns of patient disruption in stoppages

AS NURSES announced the 52 hospitals and mental health services to be hit by work stoppages next week, the HSE warned of cancellations in elective surgery and disruptions in in-patient services as the authority concentrated on providing emergency and critical care.

The HSE said the dispute was costing the health services a minimum of €1.5 million per week and that the money would have to come from budgets for patient services.

HSE chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm also warned that nurses’ salaries may be cut.

“It is becoming hard to justify a situation where we have 40,000 staff on full salary doing just 60-80% of the duties they are paid to do while, on the other hand, we also have to bring in extra people and pay overtime to make up this shortfall,” he said.

He also warned that the HSE had reached a point where it had to look carefully at whether it could continue to maintain services at normal levels while assuring patients’ safety.

“As our capacity to manage the risk becomes increasingly compromised we will have to concentrate on emergency and critical care and this may result in a reduction in overall service to patients,” he warned at a press conference in Dublin yesterday.

He also felt sure that the nurses were unhappy that the action they were pursuing was disrupting patient care. “I don’t believe the majority of nurses want to be in this action.”

Both the Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) and the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) offered a glimmer of hope for a breakthrough yesterday when they jointly stated that they were immediately available for “meaningful negotiations” without pre-conditions.

The two organisations also warned, however, that they were prepared for a long dispute, with longer work stoppages in support for their 10% pay rise and 35-hour working week.

Prof Drumm described the willingness of the two nursing organisations to become involved in talks without pre-conditions as significant but, he said, if the first issue was the demand for a date for the implementation of the 35-hour working week, it would represent a “false dawn” for the public.

“We cannot sign up to a commitment to reduce the working week by a particular date until we can agree on how it could be achieved and unions sign up to the changes to make it possible. To do so would be irresponsible,” he said.

The unions representing 44,000 nurses detailed their planned new actions in Ballybofey, Co Donegal, where the PNA was holding its annual conference. Around 10,000 nurses will be participating in the one-hour stoppages. The escalation means that by next Friday all major acute hospitals, together with mental health services in the same geographic area, will have been hit by stoppages in addition to the ongoing work to rule.

But the nurses have vehemently rejected suggestions they were putting patients at risk and insisted that they remained fully committed to providing a full range of direct nursing and midwifery care to all patients.

INO general secretary Liam Doran said he had no doubt that the dispute was having a hard effect on management who are having to underscore some of the contingency plans with extra administrative on-call work at the weekend.

“We stand over our statement that nurses and midwives are at work. They are fulfilling all direct patient care and we do not believe we have in any way compromised that patient care,” he said.