Further cutbacks threaten patients

SIPTU has warned that the risk to patients posed by cutbacks in the health service will continue next year because of further budget shortfalls.

And it has also said that if the Health Service Executive (HSE) makes any attempt to undermine the rights of its members working in the sector, the union would support any action up to and including full scale industrial action to deal with it.

Speaking at the union’s biennial delegate conference in Tralee yesterday, the union’s chief health negotiator, Matt Merrigan, said given the way the economy is expected to be structured next year, there would only be a 4.5% increase in the health budget when, in order to keep up with inflation and increased costs, that percentage should be closer to 8%.

Mr Merrigan said with a budget of €14 billion there should be enough money to go around to ensure staff and patients were protected.

“But what is happening at the moment is an unstructured approach to the whole issue of the budgetary situation. Indeed, the concern we have is that the HSE as an organisation is not running the way it should,” he said.

“People should know for the first time ever, given that the trade union has been saying over the last two weeks, patient care is directly affected through the cutbacks in the HSE.

“All you have to do is cast your mind back to the previous general election in 2002 when we had the same difficulties as we have now in relation to financial downturns. How we dealt with that was through the old health board structures. We do not have that mirrored in the HSE so we are having management by dictat.”

He said SIPTU was being left to carry social partnership in the health services and it was doing so when the management would not engage seriously in social partnership and manage the way out of the situation.

“The wake up call we want to send to the public is that until we defend the public health services there will be further attacks on it. Those attacks will open the doors for privateers to come in and take the cream of the services, make profits and leave the rest of the service to the public health services.”

Mr Merrigan said the union was determined that if there was any serious attempt by management to take away rights of members the union would consider full industrial action.

“We are not going to be left to be rolled over by employers who want to dictate the way they run the health service,” he said.

The conference was told by Noel Pocock of SIPTU’s Dublin Health Services branch that an “apartheid” had developed in the health service with patients who could afford private assurance accessing health care immediately while public patients must wait. “One way of addressing that would be the common waiting list,” he said. “That is something, the minister and department always opposed.”

“The plans to put private hospitals on public lands beside public hospitals and give them huge tax breaks is an act of desperation by a Minister of Health with no mandate and no commitment to the long-term provision of patients’ care.

“It is bad for patients and bodes ill for the future,” Mr Pocock said.