Nurses vote for union to ballot workers

An emergency meeting of mental health nurses due to transfer to a new €15m unit at Cork University Hospital (CUH) voted last night to request their union, Siptu, to ballot for industrial action.

The nurses remain unhappy with the terms of an agreement designed to resolve a row that has delayed the opening of the 50-bed acute unit by seven months.

However, the nurses voted in favour of the agreement in the past month which would see them transfer from the existing outdated ward in the hospital to a new state-of-the-art-facility on August 5.

The HSE says it has not reneged on any part of the agreement it reached with both Siptu and the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) and that they were now in the process of implementing it.

Gretta Crowley, operations manager, HSE Mental Health Services, Cork & Kerry said, the agreed staffing was in place and that they were “implementing everything in full”.

“There is no reneging, there is no backtracking,” said Ms Crowley. “We are committed to opening the unit at the earliest possible opportunity. The agreement was reached in good faith with the unions and we are going about implementing it.”

The row, which involves 42 mental health nurses, has been the subject of industrial relations talks since January. The unit was to include a six-bed high observation ward which has been temporarily shelved and which nurses remain unhappy about. However, under the deal, while the HSE agreed to a fixed nursing complement when the high-obs ward opens, they did not set a date.

Nurses fear it may take years to open, as happened with a similar high-obs ward in Galway which should have opened seven years ago.