Health service reforms announced by the Government almost a year ago have stalled and are in danger of collapsing, a union conference was told yesterday.
Mr Kevin Callinan, the senior health official with IMPACT, said negotiations on the reforms were "painfully slow" and he accused the Government of failing to take the political decisions necessary to implement them.
The reforms announced last June included the planned abolition of the State's 10 health boards and the Eastern Regional Health Authority, and their replacement with a single Health Service Executive. They were based on the findings of two highly critical reports on health funding and the structure of the health service, the Brennan report and the Prospectus report.
Mr Callinan, who represents 25,000 health workers, told delegates to IMPACT's biennial conference in Tralee, Co Kerry, that the union had given a qualified welcome to the reforms when they were announced. Since then, there had been no improvement in the quality of services or in the fairness of the system.
IMPACT had been in discussions on the planned administrative reforms for months, yet no agreement had been reached on arrangements to protect staff. "Six months into the talks, we haven't even reached agreement on our senior management grades, the people described as the key change agents for the reforms," he said.
Progress had been so slow, he claimed, because there had been no political decisions on key matters such as the headquarter locations of new agencies, new regional boundaries or the number and composition of hospital networks. "And yet we are told that this whole transition is to be achieved by the end of the year."
Mr Callinan also accused the Government of an "obsessive focus" on administrative reforms and a failure to inject new investment or take on vested interests in the health sector. This was typified by its failure to renegotiate the hospital consultants' common contract.
Mr Pat Cox, president of the European Parliament, was the guest speaker at the conference. He rejected the view that the accession of 10 new states to the EU would lead to huge numbers of people migrating from eastern Europe to the West.