The board of the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) will meet on Friday to consider taking industrial action in the wake of talks at the Workplace Relations Commission on Thursday, which the union said failed to address its concerns on staffing levels.
The union’s membership had voted overwhelmingly in June for industrial action over what it said was the HSE’s failure to fill some 700 vacancies, many of them relating to supervisory roles, across the country’s mental health services.
A decision on the action was later deferred, after the announcement that the HSE’s recruitment ban was to be lifted. The subsequent publication of the executive’s Pay and Numbers Strategy (PNS), which established its intended cap on staff numbers into 2025, undermined any prospect that significant numbers of vacancies would be filled.
That position appears to have been unchanged after Thursday’s talks, and the PNA board will now decide whether to press ahead with industrial action or potentially seek a further intervention by the WRC.
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Seven other unions operating in the health sector, meanwhile, are to consider their options over the coming weeks after a separate meeting on Thursday with the HSE to discuss their concerns over future recruitment in light of the cap on numbers envisaged in the PNS.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, Irish Medical Organisation, Fórsa, Siptu, Unite, Connect and the Medical Laboratory Scientists Association are all said to have agreed to consult their executives between now and early September. Ballots on industrial action are by some described as “inevitable” if the HSE does not reconsider its position.
“The HSE has pre-existing agreements on consultation which they have broken,” said INMO director of industrial relation Albert Murphy on Thursday.
The cap of 129,753 whole time equivalents (WTEs) is based on a figure of 125,420 WTEs at the end of last year with provision for additional recruitment in specific areas. This, it is said, will have the net effect of suppressing some 2,000 roles that were vacant on December 31st and which could only now be filled subject to the cap on numbers and spending being observed.
The unions say, however, a substantial number of additional staff was needed at the end of last year. They say the new system will cause substantial delays, even to recruitment where a need had previously been agreed upon, such as with additional nurses in emergency departments.
Head of Fórsa’s health and welfare division Ashley Connolly also criticised the HSE’s failure to engage. “The Labour Court has been clear there should be a process of consultation before decisions are finalised,” she said.
“Our members have already been telling us they are not in a position to deliver the services required; that’s not a great position to be in heading into the winter,” Ms Connolly said.
[ HSE spends €4.2bn on outside agency staff since 2013Opens in new window ]
In a statement the HSE denied it had breached its obligations to consult the unions and said it had “engaged extensively with the staff side throughout the recruitment pause and stressed that the resolution of the issues arising from the pause lay in the finalisation of a comprehensive PNS”.
“The unions sought the finalisation of the PNS and we are pleased that this has now been achieved. The recruitment embargo was in place because we over recruited beyond funded levels. There was a net increase in employment of over 25,000 staff since the beginning of 2020. The embargo is now lifted because the PNS has been finally agreed.”
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