The Government should extend the €1,000 bonus for frontline healthcare workers during the Covid-19 pandemic to frontline retail workers, pharmacists and home and family carers, their representative groups have said.

Trade union Mandate said any once-off Government payment recognising the work of frontline healthcare workers during the pandemic should be extended to all frontline workers, across the public and private sector, and include frontline retail workers.

The Irish Pharmacy Union (IPU) said the 13,300 people working in community pharmacies should be given the €1,000 payment in line with other frontline workers because they remained open during each lockdown and maintained a supply of medicines to patients.

Hospital Report

IPU president Dermot Twomey said pharmacies went “above and beyond providing an essential service to patients and the public in extraordinarily difficult circumstances”.

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“This act of maintaining services has come at considerable cost to pharmacies and pharmacy staff. There has been elevated levels of stress, anxiety and burnout among pharmacists during the pandemic, while all pharmacy staff have consistently operated at a higher risk of exposure to Covid than many other healthcare professions,” he said.

Family Carers Ireland and Home and Community Care Ireland, which represent thousands of carers, said the bonus should be extended to home carers because of the work they did in reducing the spread of the virus and keeping vulnerable people safe at home and out of hospitals.

There are an estimated 20,000 home carers in the country.

‘Missed opportunity’

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation called for the bonus to be extended to private hospitals and GP surgeries, saying it expected private sector employers of nurses to pay this bonus. It urged employers in the private sector and GPs "to do so immediately".

Catherine Cox, spokeswoman for Family Carers Ireland, said not paying the bonus would be "another missed opportunity" by the Government to show family carers it recognised their work.

“The role they’ve played in keeping their loved ones safe and the impact on their own mental and financial wellbeing continues to be ignored,” she said.

An additional public holiday “will be of no help” to carers and could instead increase the burden of care as schools and day services would have to close, she said.

Ms Cox said the bonus should be extended to those in receipt of the Carer’s Support Grant.

Joseph Musgrave, chief executive of Home and Community Care Ireland, which represents employers with about 10,000 carers, said Department of Health officials had told the group guidelines for eligibility for the €1,000 bonus had not yet been finalised.

He has written to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly asking for home carers to be included.

“A failure to extend this to the home care sector, and family carers, would be a betrayal of the near two years of hard work from tens of thousands of carers across the country,” he said.

‘Token of gratitude’

Carers had kept Covid-19 cases below 1 per cent of the people they cared for and continued to provide care “when the rest of us were locked down”, he said.

“I hope the Government will do the right thing by our nation’s carers and ensure they too receive this token of gratitude on behalf of the Irish people,” said Mr Cosgrave.

Fórsa, the country’s largest public service union, said it would be looking for clarity from the department on whether health and social care professionals, such as occupational therapists who worked in Covid-19 swabbing, would be included in the bonus plan.

A union spokesman said more information was being sought around those who would be eligible under the qualifying definition of people who worked in “clinical Covid-exposed environments”.

The Psychiatric Nurses Association said private employers of psychiatric nurses should make the €1,000 bonus payment to them in recognition of the "equal contribution" they made.