Hospital failed to pay engineer who kept life-saving equipment running

Beaumont Hospital has been ordered to pay an engineer nearly €12,000 after failing to pay him for three years of overtime and on-call duty as he kept "life-saving equipment" running.

Clinical engineer Gareth Enright complained against the Dublin teaching hospital to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) under section 6 of the Payment of Wages Act 1991.

He told the WRC that in 2015, three years into his employment at Beaumont, he started to receive calls outside his working hours and was informed he had been added to an on-call roster.

The hospital expected him and his colleagues to provide an out-of-hours standby service to maintain critical equipment at the hospital with no arrangement for a standby payment, he said.

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He said the calls were usually for the “most urgent situations” involving the operation of life-saving equipment and this had a “significant impact on his personal life and wellbeing”.

HSE circular

Mr Enright submitted a copy of a HSE circular on out-of-hours emergency ICT on-call arrangements issued in February 2018.

It said staff would be paid €450 for a weekend on call or a full week of nights, and that the payment would apply retrospectively to the start of August 2017.

Mr Enright said that, after first opting to apply the back pay from the date of publication of the circular, Beaumont’s HR department asked him and some of his colleagues to calculate the value of the retrospective payment.

This took some time, he said.

When he was offered a more senior role with another employer in June 2020, he asked again about the back pay and was told he would not be left out of any retrospective payments, he said.

“The payments promised by the respondent were not honoured,” he said in his submission.

Beaumont Hospital, which was represented by Ibec employer relations executive, Aoife McDonnell, at an adjudication hearing in November 2021, initially sought to have the complaint dismissed for being out of time.

Ms McDonnell argued the alleged contravention had occurred on July 31st, 2020, when a payslip was sent by post but that the complaint was lodged with the WRC on January 31st, 2021 – arguing it fell just outside the six-month window to take a complaint and should not be entertained by the commission.

Adjudication officer Conor Stokes said it was "settled law" that correspondence sent by post is deemed to be delivered the next working day. He ruled that the date the letter was sent was the Friday of a bank holiday weekend, and found that the payslip had been delivered the following Tuesday, August 4th, 2020.

“The complaint was made within the time limits,” he said.

Refuted claim

In its submission, Beaumont Hospital said it “refutes the claim in its entirety” and said Mr Enright was paid in full in line with his contract of employment.

Ms McDonnell argued the Payment of Wages Act did not allow Mr Enright to seek costs or any other sum not set out in his contract and said the complaint was “without merit”.

In his judgment, Mr Stokes wrote that the contract of employment “cannot be regarded in isolation” where a circular issued by Beaumont’s parent organisation had a bearing on wages and operational policy.

He said the circular issued in February 2018 “could be regarded as written notification of terms and conditions of employment”.

By discussing the back pay with his former colleagues and then paying them, “the respondent accepted that such payments constituted the wages properly payable”, he wrote.

“I find that the amount properly payable to the complainant is the same level of remuneration as his colleagues were receiving at the same time. Accordingly, I find that the complaint is well founded,” he wrote.

He ordered Beaumont Hospital to pay Mr Enright €11,891.28 for a combination of overtime pay and an on-call allowance for a period from August 2017 to September 2018.