Health service employers are seeking to withhold pay increases due to GPs, non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs or junior doctors) and public health doctors from the beginning of June.
The employers have cited the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO), which represents the doctors, for breaching Sustaining Progress and have recommended they should not be paid a 2½ per cent pay increase due to them on June 1st. The move comes just days ahead of the annual conference of the IMO, which now looks set to be a heated affair.
However delegates at the conference in Killarney next week will be unable to vent their anger on the Minister for Health Mary Harney, who has said she will be unable to attend because her party conference takes place at the same time.
The reasons why the different doctors groups have been cited for a breach of Sustaining Progress vary. The State's 4,000 junior doctors have been cited over their alleged refusal to co-operate with attempts to finalise new rosters being drawn up to try and cut their working hours to comply with a new EU directive, while the 200 public health doctors in the State have been threatened with having their pay increase withheld over their alleged failure to engage in further negotiations on the setting up of an out-of- hours' service.
GPs have been cited over their alleged questioning of the role of the health sector performance verification group in determining pay increases for GPs.
Gerard Barry, chief executive of the Health Service Executive Employers' Agency, said last night that the IMO, by impeding work on new rosters for junior doctors, was trying to ensure "the extraordinarily high overtime earnings that doctors have become accustomed to" were maintained.
He said the annual overtime bill for junior doctors was over €200 million a year. "They are averaging €1,000 a week each in overtime," he said.
Fintan Hourihan, director of industrial relations with the IMO, said the citing of the three groups of doctors for breaches of Sustaining Progress was completely unjustified.
"There is a serious concern on our part that the powers that be are trying to orchestrate across the board conflict with the medical profession and to find scapegoats for their abject failure to deal with problems in the health service," he said.
Mr Hourihan said the country's 2,000 GPs had been cited because employers were unhappy with the speed of progress on talks which were chaired by the labour relations commission.
"This is completely unprecedented that in the middle of negotiations you are cited by the employers side," he said.
He added that the IMO had serious concerns about junior doctors being "bullied" into working rosters they were not happy with.