UNIONS REPRESENTING more than 7,000 psychiatric nurses have deferred a planned escalation of their dispute over a new compensation scheme for staff assaulted at work, following talks at the Labour Relations Commission (LRC).
The Psychiatric Nurses’ Association and Siptu will hold further talks with health service management at the LRC today and tomorrow on a framework proposal to settle the dispute.
The framework was agreed late on Saturday night.
An overtime ban, which has caused disruption to mental health services in some parts of the country over the last 10 days, will continue.
Talks between the unions and management today and tomorrow will centre on four areas.
These include a significant broadening of the type of injuries that would qualify for compensation under the scheme, as well as the amounts to apply.
The talks will also deal with a mechanisms for dealing with cases of staff who suffer psychological trauma but not physical injury as a result of assaults, as well as procedures for handling incidents that took place before the compensation scheme was introduced.
The unions have argued that the levels of compensation on offer under the HSE compensation scheme are far less than those set out under the Personal Injuries Assessent Board system established by the Government.
Management is expected to argue in the talks that, under the compensation scheme for psychiatric nurses, liability would be automatically accepted and that, as a result, a discount should apply on the level of compensation being provided.
Disruption to mental health services in some parts of the country is likely to continue as a result of the on-going overtime ban introduced by the unions, which will remain in place.
Patients in hospitals such as Naas General have been particularly affected by the industrial action over the last 10 days, while about 80 patients at the Central Mental Hospital had to spend an addition 90 minutes on Thursday morning locked in their rooms as a result of staff shortages.
A number of community services have also been closed or scaled back to allow management to transfer staff to the hospital sector to cope with the overtime ban.
However, the unions warned last week that from today they would escalate their action and refuse to co-operate with the redeployment of psychiatric nurses from the community sector to cover gaps in hospitals caused by the overtime ban.
They said that the impact of such a move would be “huge”.
However, this threat of escalation in the dispute has now been lifted.
The Minister for Health, Mary Harney, said last week that one of the issues that arose from the psychiatric nurses’ dispute was that there was a very heavy reliance on overtime in the mental health sector.
She said she had spoken to Health Service Executive chief Prof Brendan Drumm about this issue.