Nurses campaigning for better pay and conditions will hold further one-hour work stoppages at hospitals across the State next Tuesday and Wednesday. Eithne Donnellan, Health Correspondent, reports.
The Irish Timesunderstands that three acute hospitals, as well as mental health facilities, will be hit with stoppages on Tuesday.
These are expected to include Sligo General Hospital, Louth County Hospital in Dundalk and another, still to be decided, hospital in Cork.
On Wednesday another three acute hospitals, in addition to mental health facilities, are to be affected. These are said to include St James's Hospital in Dublin, the largest hospital in the State.
Full details of the stoppages will be announced by the Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) and the Psychiatric Nurses' Association (PNA) tomorrow.
It is believed that no work stoppages will be scheduled for Thursday or Friday as these dates coincide with the PNA's annual conference in Ballybofey, Co Donegal. Minister for Health Mary Harney is to address the conference on Thursday afternoon.
Meanwhile, the work-to-rule by about 40,000 nurses who are members of the INO and PNA continues and today enters its 13th day. Under this, nurses are not dealing with non-essential phone calls or carrying out clerical or IT duties. The nurses are seeking a 10.6 per cent pay rise and a 35-hour working week. At present they work a 39-hour week.
They also held one-hour work stoppages at three hospitals yesterday including Dublin's Beaumont Hospital, Roscommon County Hospital and Roscommon mental health services, and St Ita's Hospital in Portrane, Dublin, incorporating St Joseph's services for the intellectually disabled.
Beaumont, in a statement afterwards, said the stoppage meant that a small number of outpatient appointments and one-day procedures had to be rescheduled.
The HSE said the one-hour stoppage by nurses at St Ita's and St Joseph's did not give rise to any disruption of services over and above that anticipated.
Elsewhere, in Roscommon little disruption was caused by the work stoppage.
However, the hospital's A&E unit was reported to have large numbers of patients on trolleys but locally it was claimed this had nothing to do with the work stoppage.
Gerry O'Dwyer of the HSE's national hospitals' office said last evening that a number of A&E units were slow as a result of the nurses' ongoing work-to-rule and he appealed to people not to go to A&E unless absolutely necessary. They should see a GP instead.
But he stressed that anyone with an outpatient appointment, who had not been informed it had been cancelled, should turn up as normal. It is understood large numbers of people have not been turning up for these appointments since the dispute began and it is feared they may think this is the correct thing to do, when it is not.
Meanwhile, Prof Rajnish Gupta, a consultant oncologist at the Mid-Western Regional Hospital in Limerick, said his earlier concerns about nurses not answering phones in the oncology ward at the hospital had been resolved. This was very important he said as these phones were a lifeline for patients who were ill after they went home following chemotherapy or other treatments.
But he said he was still concerned that nurses in the unit were not inputting patient records into a special computer system. They were recording the information on paper and this potentially left room for something to go wrong, he said. He, again, appealed for cancer services to be exempted from the nurses' industrial action.