Nurses stage sit-in after pay warning

NURSES staged a sit-in at a major acute hospital in Dublin last night after management warned that more than half of the members of their strike committee would not be paid unless they returned to their normal clinical duties.

It took a visit from the general secretary of the Irish Nurses Organisation (INO), Liam Doran, to calm the situation down and encourage the 30 nurses involved in the sit in at St Vincent’s Hospital to call off their protest.

Mr Doran also agreed to meet with management later today to try and resolve the issue.

Management at St Vincent’s has claimed that the 16-member strike committee is three times larger than other strike committees in similar sized hospitals.

Nine members of the committee were told on Monday that if they did not return to their normal clinical duties, they could not be paid. The other seven members are on various forms of leave, including sick leave, and annual holidays.

“Management has impressed on them that they will get any reasonable amount of time off to do their strike committeeduties but nurses need to be available to do their clinical duties,” a spokesperson for the hospital said last night.

And, he said, the number of nurses involved in strike committee duties depended on the issue involved.

“It would appear that other hospitals are able to manage strike committees with just four or five people,” said the spokesperson who stressed that the hospital’s core objective was to ensure the safety and comfort of patients.

Meanwhile, a patients’ rights group said it was a great relief that nurses have suspended further industrial action while they consider new proposals aimed at resolving the seven-week-old dispute.

Patient Focus spokesperson Sheila O’Connor said they had received a number of calls from very distressed patients and relatives.

The organisation also received telephone calls from nurses who were unhappy having to walk off the wards during the work stoppages.

Patient Focus was particularly annoyed that some nurses had been askingpatients to wear stickers supporting their industrialaction.

“We did not thinkpatients should be recruited in that way,” she said.