Health service dispute - Two-pronged fight could hurt Coalition
Stepping up their campaign for a 10% pay hike and a 35-hour week, the country’s 40,000 nurses are planning to disrupt the service with rolling one-hour work stoppages at medical and mental health centres in Sligo, Louth, Leitrim, West Cork, Laois, Offaly and Clare.
Up to now, the health of patients appears not to have suffered adversely in hospitals where stoppages have already taken place, despite a countrywide work-to-rule across the health service.
But as the industrial campaign intensifies the danger to patients is certain to increase notwithstanding assurances from nurses that critical care and emergency situations will be covered. Thankfully, cancer, palliative care services and Warfarin clinics are running as normal.
On the pay question, nurses have been told by Ms Harney and the Health Service Executive (HSE) there can be no negotiation outside benchmarking. For several years, the accord has contributed significantly towards industrial calm.
But with job losses mounting, as foreign companies leave Ireland for sweat-shop locations, it will be increasingly difficult to avoid industrial unrest in the future. Given the hopes placed by government in the national pay agreement, Towards 2016, its determination to prevent the deal from unravelling is understandable.
However, nurses have little trust in benchmarking, having received an 8% pay increase while administrative staff received twice as much. That explains their militancy.
On the thorny issue of the 35-hour week, nurses argued they were one of the few groups in the health service not to enjoy a shorter week. Their case has been complicated, however, by fresh claims from 45,000 other workers in the service for a shorter working week. This means the HSE and the Government could have a much bigger fight on their hands.
When it comes to a question of money, there is no sympathy at all for highly paid consultants who have created an empire of their own within the health service. Public support for Ms Harney’s efforts to reform this system is not at issue.
It is utterly unacceptable that people who fall ill have to rely on a two-tier system where private patients get Rolls Royce treatment while those in the public system can die while waiting in seemingly never-ending queues for access to a hospital bed.
That said, consultants are right to oppose the controversial gagging clause which the HSE and the minister are trying to enforce. Not alone is this unacceptable, it is anti-democratic, especially at a time when the Government is making noises about protecting whistle-blowers.
Bureaucrats and politicians want to prevent doctors from revealing, for instance, the inequities of a system where patients still have to queue for treatment or spend days and weeks on trolleys in hospital corridors. The Government would be well advised to re-consider its management style in dealing with nurses, doctors and other sections of the health service.
At the end of the day, whatever about consultants, the public is generally supportive of nurses who continue to play a frontline role at the coalface of the health service where their enormous contribution has been under-valued by successive governments.
A settlement will eventually have to be worked out. But with a general election only weeks away, the question facing the outgoing Coalition is whether it can afford a two-pronged battle on the health front.
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