The recruitment and retention of nurses as a crucial part of the Government's new health strategy is a non-runner on the basis of the pay awards recommended by the Public Service Benchmarking Body, the chairman of the Nursing Alliance of trade unions has warned.
"The health strategy is simply not deliverable based on the increases recommended for staff nurses," said Mr Liam Doran, general secretary of the largest of the nursing unions, the Irish Nurses' Organisation.
"It will not address the haemorrhage out of the system by younger nurses in the first three or four years after qualification."
This was a quite separate issue from whether nurses would accept or reject the benchmarking body's recommendations, Mr Doran stressed.
Starting today, the INO is to hold a series of meetings with members at venues throughout the State to "elicit feedback" before formulating a motion on benchmarking for its annual conference, which is scheduled for September 30th.
That will be two weeks after the formal ICTU meeting on September 17th, which will decide whether the trade union movement will agree to participate in talks on a new national agreement.
Mr Doran gave no indication that the INO would be leading the charge against acceptance, however.
Staff nurses have fared significantly worse than senior nursing grades under the benchmarking recommendations.
This is a measure of the pay improvements achieved by senior nursing grades since 1997, when the differentials between a junior staff nurse's pay and that of a matron of a Dublin teaching hospital were relatively narrow.
The gap between a staff nurse's pay and that of a matron will have more than doubled under successive national wage agreements since then, however, in addition to the benchmarking recommendations.
The health strategy introduced earlier this year embraces a commitment to the training of up to 10,000 nurses in the next seven to 10 years, in line with the Government's target of creating an additional 12,000 nursing places, said Mr Doran.
"This is a crucial logistical part of the overall plan to provide up to 3,000 acute and 5,000 non-acute hospital beds as well as 600 primary care units under the new health strategy," he said.
There was currently a 22 per cent annual turnover of nurses in the large Dublin hospitals, said the INO leader.
Seen in that context, Mr Doran said, the benchmarking body's recommendations did little in terms of delivering the national health strategy.
The Civil and Public Service Union, which represents some 10,500 civil servants in the clerical officer grades - 80 per cent of them women - is also less than happy with the benchmarking report.
The union's executive council voted overwhelmingly to recommend the rejection of the recommendations on Thursday.
The report offers the clerical grades a maximum increase of €2,400. This is in contrast to the €9,000 maximum pay increase recommended for executive officers, the next grade on the seniority ladder.