The Health Service Executive has proposed talks between its chief executive and the leaders of several trade unions in an attempt to head off industrial action by thousands of healthcare staff later this month.
The HSE has also told trade unions that it expects that the staff engaged in the protest will carry out “the full range of their normal contracted duties”.
About 80,000 members of Fórsa and the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, Unite, the craft union Connect and the Medical Laboratory Scientists Association are expected to commence a work-to-rule protest at the end of March over staffing levels in the health sector.
Psychiatric nurses are scheduled to commence their work-to-rule from next Wednesday.
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The HSE on Thursday sought unions to set out precisely what they were seeking in the context of a growing workforce. It said its chief executive Bernard Gloster was prepared to meet directly with the general secretaries – the most senior leaders – of the unions scheduled to take part in the dispute in a bid to explore options to avoid the planned industrial action.
The dispute centres on a two-year staffing ceiling agreed upon by the HSE and the government last year. This provided for an additional 3,310 additional whole-time personnel last year but put in place a maximum number of 129,753 employees for 2024.
The HSE and Department of Health have told the Government this maximum figure will rise to 133,306 by the end of 2025.
However, the unions argue that the Health Service Executive “pay and numbers strategy”, as is known, poses a risk to patient safety by imposing arbitrary ceilings. They contend that the manner in which the strategy was introduced resulted in up to 3,000 existing posts being lost last year.
The HSE told unions on Thursday that the industrial action was “regrettable when set against the background of continued unprecedented expansion of employment in the health sector since the beginning of 2020 and continuing throughout the current year”.
“This has seen an overall net increase in the health sector workforce of 24 per cent to end-2024. As a practical demonstration of this expansion, nursing and midwifery numbers have increased by close to 10,000, [and] medical staffing numbers have grown by 3,600.”
Fórsa has told its members that as part of the dispute they should adhere strictly to the terms of their contract of employment, not work outside their agreed contracted hours and not work overtime or additional hours.
The union has urged members to decline, unless normally rostered, to work over weekends or bank holidays.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation has told its nurse members that they should work only within their contracted hours and not stay beyond the end of their shift.
The union urged nurses to take all scheduled breaks (such as meal breaks and rest breaks) in full and decline requests from management to swap shifts.
It said members should not accept any requests from management to work overtime or additional hours and should decline to work over weekends and/or bank holidays, unless this formed part of their normal roster.
