An emergency motion was passed at the annual conference of the Irish Nurses' Organisation in Galway last night calling on the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, to intervene directly in the public health doctors' dispute.
The public health nurses' section of the INO, in proposing the motion, said the strike by the State's public health doctors, which began four weeks ago, had many negative effects.
It had resulted in the postponement of nursing home inspections, child immunisation programmes and schemes to control the spread of infectious diseases such as meningitis, measles and TB.
Ms Anna Farrell, public health nurse, said it was time for Mr Martin to intervene and bring to an end "nine years of prevarication by his Department" on the implementation of new public healthcare structures.
Mr Martin, who attended the conference earlier in the day, appealed to the doctors, who are on strike over pay and working conditions, not to go ahead with plans to escalate the strike.
The Irish Medical Organisation has now applied to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions for permission to mount all-out pickets outside hospitals across the State, which would effectively close down hospitals.
"I regret the fact that we have an industrial relations dispute with the public health doctors. I've made it clear there is an imperative to resolve this strike. I am anxious to resolve this dispute," Mr Martin said.
"There is a substantial offer on the table. We have to resolve it within the context of public pay policy and inevitably it will have to be resolved in the context of industrial relations machinery, i.e., the Labour Relations Commission or the Labour Court, and we are prepared to do everything we possibly can to break the logjam and to see if we can get the basis for resumption of talks," he said.
"I've consistently called for the industrial action to be called off and indeed I don't see any escalation of the dispute as being helpful to the situation."
He said if both sides could bring "a bit of flexibility and creativity" to the situation, it could be resolved.
The doctors mounted information pickets outside nine acute-care hospitals yesterday, having up to now picketed just health board headquarters and the National Disease Surveillance Centre. The pickets were mounted outside hospitals in Galway, Sligo, Dundalk, Tullamore, Limerick, Waterford, Cork, Naas and Dublin.
IMO president Dr Joe Barry said they had been well received. They will be repeated on Monday. He defended plans to escalate the dispute and said Mr Martin "knows what he needs to do" to solve it but was doing nothing. "We won't call off the strike. We have an unsafe system of infectious disease control in this country and will not go back to work until it is sorted out."
There are no structures in place to roster public health doctors to work outside normal office hours or at weekends to guard against the spread of infectious diseases. The doctors have been doing this work without pay for several years but are not prepared to do so any longer.