Some 45,000 nurses will further escalate their strike action with a full ban on overtime from this Friday, resulting in what their unions said was the most serious escalation to date of their seven-week old dispute.
The executive council and officer board of the Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) and the Psychiatric Nurses' Association (PNA) today decided to instruct members to work only contracted hours from Friday May 18th next.
INO president Madeline Spiers
"From that time members will receive an explicit instruction not to work overtime or provide additional shifts on an agency basis," the unions said in a statement this evening.
The unions said the decision came in the wake of the "provocative" threat by the Health Service Executive to deduct 13.16 per cent
from nurses and midwives currently engaged in the seven week long work-to-rule.
"Both unions believe that the work to rule has, in fact, improved the time nurses and midwives can spend with their patients and the quality of patient care as a result. They believe the items banned are duties which have been taken for granted and which have little to do with the core functions of
nursing/midwifery," the unions' statement added.
They sais they expected that the ban on overtime will have "a major impact across all services and it represents the most serious escalation of the dispute to date".
Speaking following the meeting, INO president, Madeline Spiers, said: "The HSE's decision to deduct pay and demand that nurses/midwives comply strictly with their contract has provoked a response which will ensure that they will do no more than their contracted hours.
"Perhaps now HSE will come to realise just how much front line services are dependent upon the goodwill of nurses/midwives who fill in the gaps arising from the rigidly imposed government staff ceiling."
PNA general secretary Des Kavanagh said: "PNA have advocated full employment as an alternative to excessive overtime and the employers failure to heed that call has led to an over reliance of overtime in psychiatric services. The chronic under-resourcing of mental health services will now come back to haunt the HSE for their mismanagement."
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern earlier said the threat by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to cut nurses' pay by 13.16 per cent on Friday unless they abandon their industrial action is "making things worse".
In an interview this evening, Mr Ahern was asked about the current crisis in the health service, which has seen nurses engaged in an ongoing work-to-rule action as well as additional work stoppages at health services throughout the State.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern
"It's making things worse, there's no doubt about that," said Mr Ahern, speaking on Today FM.
He repeated his suggestion of last weekend that an independent international expert be brought in to help resolve the dispute.
And Mr Ahern insisted that the pay element of the nurses' claim - whereby they are seeking a pay rise of 10.6 per cent - must be dealt with within the normal industrial relations mechanisms applying to other public servants.
"The pay element has to be dealt with in benchmarking. There's no other way of doing that," Mr Ahern said.
"And of course from my point of view, from the Government's point of view, we wish the nurses well in their case and in the case put forward."
Nurses feel aggrieved that the previous 'benchmarking' award was unfair to them and that the method of calculating the payments was not transparent.
No data from the benchmarking process on how various pay awards would apply to different sectors of the public service was made publicly available.
The 45,000 striking nurses are also seeking a date by when their full-time working week will be reduced from 39 hours to 35.
Mr Ahern said today that this must be done on a "cost-neutral basis" because it would involve taking some 7.7 million working hours out of the health system.
He acknowledged that the nurses had, throughout their dispute, stated that they are "prepared to be involved in new efficiencies" and prepared to do things they haven't previously done. But the Taoiseach said reducing their working week "cannot be done in the next week or month".
The Health Service Executive (HSE) confirmed it will dock nurses' pay by 13.16 per cent on Friday unless they abandon their industrial action.
A spokesman said today the HSE would proceed with its plan to deduct pay from some 45,000 members of the INO and PNA unless it received written confirmation from individual employees that they would discontinue their work stoppages.
Last week the HSE wrote letters to the striking staff to warn them of the plan, saying it could not stand over a service which was being "slowly corroded" by a work-to-rule and a series of work stoppages.
In response to the move, the nurses said they will escalate their dispute over pay and conditions with simultaneous two-hour work stoppages at every public hospital on Wednesday.
Today nurses held three-hour work stoppages at Beaumont Hospital, Naas General Hospital and Sligo General Hospital. Mental health services at Portrane in north Dublin, Kildare and Sligo were also hit by the stoppages when nurses walked off wards for a time.
The HSE confirmed that more than 300 outpatient appointments and medical procedures were cancelled as result of the stoppages.
A HSE spokeswoman said 230 elective procedures had been postponed at Beaumont Hospital while 57 had been cancelled at Sligo General Hospital and a further 30 at Naas General.
Under the work-to-rule, nurses are refusing to answer telephones, attend meetings or open or close community buildings, while nurses and midwives have also been advised to withdraw all goodwill gestures and overtime.
Talks under the aegis of the National Implementation Body, the Government's main industrial relations trouble-shooting mechanism for the public service, failed to end the impasse between the unions and health service employers.