Talks between the psychiatric nurses' unions and the HSE are continuing at the Labour Relations Commission this evening in a bid to resolve the increasingly bitter psychiatric nurses’ dispute.
A spokesman said the talks are expected to last well into the night and had been broadly positive so far.
Patient transfers and ward closures hit hospitals across the State yesterday. Patients at Dublin’s Central Mental Hospital were locked in their rooms yesterday morning because of a staff shortage.
The Health Service Executive (HSE) criticised the nurses’ actions, while the nurses warned the Government that their “goodwill” was fast running out.
The HSE’s 8,000 psychiatric nurses, represented by the Psychiatric Nurses’ Association (PNA) and Siptu, are refusing to work overtime in a dispute that centres on a compensation scheme for staff attacked on the job.
Yesterday’s stoppage in Dundrum occurred when staff realised there were too few people to run the afternoon shift, said Des Kavanagh of the PNA.
The nurses reached a compromise agreement to reopen the wards yesterday and today with HSE managers. But at other hospitals, wards were being closed and patients transferred to neighbouring facilities, he added.
Units at St Loman’s Hospital in Palmerstown were closed last night to free up staff to reopen a main admissions ward in Tallaght hospital, he said, with patients transferred to Tallaght.
Minister for Health Mary Harney welcomed the Labour Relations Commission’s invitation to hold talks with the two parties today. She expressed “deep concern” at the impact of the dispute on the care of psychiatric patients.
Ibec said the overtime ban was “unacceptable” and accused nurses and their unions of “using the most vulnerable in our society and their families without regard to the impact of their actions on mental health service provision”.