HSE's treatment of surgeon 'shoddy'

A locum consultant surgeon employed on a succession of fixed term contracts by the Health Service Executive since 2000 has won his High Court claim that the HSE has breached his contract of employment since January 2005.

Dr Ibrahim Ahmed, who has not been permitted to work at the Louth County Hospital, Dundalk, since January 2005 but who has continued to be paid basic remuneration under the Consultants Common Contract, had been treated by the HSE in "a shoddy manner" both before and during his High Court action, Ms Justice Mary Laffoy also stated.

Dr Ahmed had claimed that in light of the Protection of Employees Fixed Term Work Act 2003, he had a permanent contract of employment as a consultant surgeon at Louth County Hospital.

The effect of that Act on his employment was at the core of his High Court action against the HSE.

The impact of the 2003 Act on Dr Ahmed's contract was that since June 30th, 2004, he had been employed on a contract of indefinite duration, the judge said. That had been agreed by the HSE in March 2005 after Dr Ahmed brought a case before the Rights Commissioner.

However, as the HSE had not allowed Dr Ahmed to engage in either public or private practice at Louth County Hospital since January 2005 and had failed to make an offer of appropriate alternative employment to him, it had breached his contract of employment since January 2005, the judge ruled.

The fact that Dr Ahmed had pursued claims before the Rights Commissioner did not prevent his bringing the High Court action, she added.

She was satisfied the terms of the Consultants Common Contract applied to Dr Ahmed's employment, insofar as those terms were consistent with a fixed-term contract.

Negotiations on a contract for Dr Ahmed are under way in light of the court's findings in his favour, the judge was told yesterday.

In her judgment, Ms Justice Laffoy had noted that an important letter not disclosed to the court until well into the hearing had urged the management of the North Eastern Health Board as long ago as April 2004 to address the position of Dr Ahmed and other "long-term locum consultants".

In that letter, Mr Finbar Lennon, a consultant surgeon and medical adviser to NEHB management, had told management the locum consultants believed they had a very strong case to be retained in permanent employment and warned that "long-fingering" their frequent representations would be foolish and unwise.

It was "a disquieting feature" of the case that this letter and other relevant documents were not discovered, as they should have been, until a supplemental affidavit was sworn well into the hearing as a result of the persistence of Dr Ahmed's legal team following a tip off from a "whistleblower", the judge said.

While ruling in favour of Dr Ahmed, the judge said she was not impervious to the difficulty created for the HSE management by the impact of the Fixed Term Work Act 2003 on Dr Ahmed's employment at a time of "radical restructuring of surgical services" in the North Eastern Area in the public interest.

She had urged the parties several times during the hearing of the case to try to resolve the dispute between them without the court having to make an order but, unfortunately, that did not happen.

Dr Ahmed's contract must be honoured but an agreed solution to the predicament was in the interests of all, she stressed.