Harney must find way to end conflict

ALTHOUGH long overdue, the announcement by Tánaiste and Health Minister Mary Harney that E25 million has been approved for two new BreastCheck units in the southern and western regions will be welcomed.

Potentially, the lives of up to 1,000 women will be saved once the units materialise in 2007. By then the Tánaiste is confident, and is committed, that the national roll-out of the BreastCheck programme will be complete.

Apart from the construction of the static units, which will be based in the South Infirmary/Victoria Hospital in Cork, and at UCH in Galway, there will also be mobile units attached to both centres.

The lack of screening facilities has been directly responsible for the deaths of women in this country, in contrast to the North, where a nationally sponsored programme has been in place for more than a decade.

There, breast cancer rates are falling by a rate of 4% a year, a reflection of the efficacy of the service and the fact that women are alert to the importance of using it.

In the aftermath of this much-awaited announcement, the Tánaiste is due to attend the conference of the Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) in Killarney today, (Friday) where delegates are already in an irate mood over the threat by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to withhold a pay increase due to the nurses under the Sustaining Progress national pay agreement.

The delegates have already carried an emergency motion supporting any action necessary to ensure their 3.5% rise and are not, understandably, prepared to entertain any lecture from the health minister.

That action could see the INO’s 30,000 nurses take strike action if the atmosphere between themselves and the health employers is allowed to deteriorate any further. The INO maintains that the threatened blocking of the pay increase is directly linked to the protests the nurses held over the crisis in A&E departments. If that is correct, the action of the HSE will be seen as a retaliatory tactic by the public, who are already only too well aware of the appalling conditions in those departments in hospitals throughout the country.

The HSE is threatening to withhold the payments from the start of next month, not because of the A&E protests but because they complain that the INO has refused to co-operate with the introduction of a new training scheme for healthcare assistants and is, thus, in breach of agreements.

Whichever is the correct version, there is sufficient time for both parties to discuss this particular issue without allowing an industrial relations problem to further deteriorate the situation in a troubled and expensive health service. Ms Harney has to contend with more than enough already without facing possible strike action. Therefore, it is in her own interests, but more especially those of patients, that she take the opportunity in attending the IMO conference to facilitate a resolution to this potential collision.