Sir, – In the past number of years the HSE has been the subject of several legal actions taken by doctors to attempt to compel it to honour the contracts it has made with them. Invariably these cases have centred on the issue of non-payment of overtime for the frankly punishing hours worked by doctors in the line of duty.
It is instructive that managers and administrators continue to deny junior doctors their wages around the country when even the Minister for Health James Reilly himself has directly instructed that this practice is verboten.
I was hardly surprised then, when upon arriving last week at Waterford regional hospital as a doctor working in surgery, I was told casually by a nice lady in the human resources office that, “You know, of course, they are not paying any of your overtime here at the moment . . . but I suppose you’ll want to fill in the claim forms all the same”.
Now, in a short few weeks’ time at the height of the silly season, your pages and those of the other papers will be awash with the usual stories of the handful of non- consultant hospital doctors who, through no fault of their own are forced to work simply inhuman rosters, and then remarkably find themselves in receipt of large sums of money in overtime for their work.
The begrudgers need not worry, for these few who actually managed to get paid are in the minority. The vast majority of us are subject to a management with a degrading and casual disregard for the difficulty of our work and an administration that believes a contract has no meaning other than outlining your obligations to the employer and not the other way round.
When those headlines do come, please balance your coverage by interviewing a doctor or two and asking them what it feels like to drive your car home after working from a Friday morning until Monday evening without stopping.
Ask them was this shift a rarity, an anomaly? Or something necessary and built into the very survival of the hospital? Then ask them what they think the odds are that they will be paid for this shift. Then publish their responses. – Yours, etc,