Trade unions in the health sector have called on the Government to provide supplementary funding to end the current round of cutbacks and staffing restrictions introduced by the Health Service Executive (HSE) in an effort to balance its budget.
In a statement issued after a meeting of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions health staff panel yesterday, the unions said the Government should provide additional money to allow the services to be delivered at the same levels as in the first seven months of the year.
Following the meeting, the unions, which include Siptu, Impact, the Irish Nurses Organisation and the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO), said they would pursue a case to the Labour Relations Commission (LRC) and possibly the Labour Court on whether the HSE had been in breach of the national agreement, Towards 2016, in the manner in which it had implemented the current cutbacks.
The unions said they expected this procedure "would confirm that a breach of the agreement had taken place" and that the circulars on staffing restrictions should be withdrawn.
The unions said they would be advising their 100,000 members in the health sector to comply in full with their directive issued a fortnight ago that they should not co-operate with the HSE's current cost-containment programme which is aimed at tackling a deficit of over €200 million.
The unions said they would be drawing special attention to the right of individual members to seek a risk assessment of their workplace if they believed that it had been adversely affected by the current cutbacks. The director of industrial relations at the IMO, Fintan Hourihan, said the meeting had considered industrial action in protest at the cutbacks and this would be kept under review. Talks at the LRC are to begin next Wednesday.
Minister for Finance Brian Cowen said yesterday there had been large increases in health spending in the first nine months of the year, but adjustments had to be made to ensure spending remained within budgets.
