Junior doctors to benefit from new EU directives

Junior hospital doctors and transport workers are set to benefit from an important decision on working hours made by the European Commission.

Some five million workers across Europe, previously exempted from EU working-time limits, are now to be included, following the Commission's decision yesterday.

They include junior doctors, road hauliers and rail, sea, offshore and air workers, in an effort to protect not only workers but the public from the effects of exhausting hours, according to the Commissioner for Social Affairs, Mr Padraig Flynn. The agreed directives, which will set maximum average working weeks (48 hours), minimum rest periods (11 hours a day), breaks, annual leave (four weeks) and conditions for night work, as well as tightening up safety checks such as lorry tachographs, now go for approval to Ministers and the European Parliament.

Among those directly affected will be Irish junior doctors. Ostensibly on a 39-hour week, they work on average 65 hours, and significant numbers are known to work more than 75 hours, particularly in surgery and obstetrics.

The provisions for junior doctors involve a seven-year transition period to the 48-hour week during which they will work a 54-hour maximum (averaged out over a four-month period).

But although this is 11 hours less than the current Irish average working week for junior doctors, the Commission's definition of a working week is based on presence "at place of work and working", thus omitting on-call hours at hospitals.

The Irish average includes on-call hours and classroom teaching. One source at the Department of Health suggests the Department may not have much difficulty complying with the 54-hour transitional rule.

The Department was relieved by the proposal for a seven-year transition, the time it takes to train a doctor, as the Commission had recently been hinting at only a two-year delay.

In the longer term the Department will have some negotiating difficulties ahead, however, as there is likely to be an insistence that the changes be introduced without increases in manpower.

Cost considerations apart, there is concern that an increase in the number of junior doctors would create a substantial career bulge later which the profession could not absorb. The directives are based largely on agreements reached between the social partners which under the Maastricht Treaty can be given legal standing.