Sir, - As the social partners begin negotiations on a new deal, there is an opportunity to acknowledge the lessons of nine regrettable days in Irish healthcare. Regardless of blame, the nursing strike was uncivilised, inhumane and immensely damaging to vulnerable patients from all age-groups. For me, the most sickening aspect was that the nursing alliance and the Government glibly agreed that a safe nursing strike was possible.
The experience was very different to these predictions. Cancer patients lay on wards untreated, premature infants were fed sugared water, and at least one preventable death occurred. Seriously ill patients refused to pass picket lines to obtain emergency treatment. Further, these effects started from the moment the strike began. There was no run-in period because the service was already running below acceptable standards. The strike highlighted the absence of any reserve capacity along with the inadequacy of "standard" dispute resolution processes.
We have seen just how essential nurses are, and we must now negotiate a new industrial relations arrangement for nursing and other essential services - a procedure which goes further than once around the Labour Court, and which could so easily have prevented this strike.
Such procedures were proposed by Mr Bertie Ahern as Minister for Justice in 1991, but were never implemented. In the interests of 35,000 patients who will continue to suffer the lasting effects of this disgrace, the parties to the partnership negotiations must agree and implement revised procedures for essential services, making action of this kind as unnecessary as it is inappropriate. - Yours, etc., Dr Tony O'Sullivan,
Irishtown Health Centre, Dublin 4.