The relief felt by all parties with a resumption of work by the nation's nurses will be enormous. Patients and their families will be primarily relieved, as will hospital doctors and managements as comprehensive patient-care becomes possible again. And many of the nurses who have been on picket lines and providing emergency care for no financial reward, will also be deeply relieved that the conflict between their professional commitment and their resolutely executed industrial action, can be resolved - at least for the time being.
But everyone's relief will be tempered by the fact that the final resolution of a dispute that should never have had to happen must await the outcome of the ballot by the four unions which make up the Nursing Alliance. The leaders of those unions have behaved with exemplary determination on behalf of their members and last night behaved with an exemplary sense of responsibility in suspending the strike action pending a ballot of the whole membership.
At the very least, the clients and the providers of health-care services need a little breathing space to provide relief and to undertake a serious examination of exactly what the details of the latest complex Labour Court proposals may mean in terms of a full settlement of the dispute. The union leaders started last night to hold briefing sessions for their members. It is very much to be hoped that, in the next few days, they will succeed in telling the nurses why they should now accept all that is on offer for them and for the profession of nursing, as well as for the future of health care in this State.
The nurses have already made clear to everyone who will listen why it is important that any settlement must include elements essential to the future of the health-care services. If their arguments before the strike fell on deaf ears (and it is apparent that the Government's ears remained deaf until strike action was undertaken), the effects of the strike itself made painfully apparent the importance of the nursing profession's full involvement in the care and cure of sick people. It is devoutly to be hoped that, at long last, after decades of neglect of nursing by the State and successive administrations, the Government (and particularly the Minister for Health) have learned the basic lessons of the changes that have taken place in nursing over a quarter of a century and of the importance of the nursing profession in the humane and skilled professional care of the sick and disabled citizens of this State.
If, over the next few days, it should become apparent that neither the Government nor the health service employers has learned what the nursing profession has tried for decades to tell them, and what the independent Commission on Nursing has set out in its report, and what the first national nursing strike has demonstrated to all, then there remains the prospect that, when they come to their ballot, the nurses will reject the new Labour Court recommendations and the strike will resume. The nurses have been left unheard for too long and have been let down too often. Too many promises lie dusty on the shelves of the Department of Health.
The Nursing Alliance leaders must be wished well in their members' meetings in the coming days, and in their recommendation that the present offer be accepted, even if it does not deliver every detail of what the nurses sought. The Government will be well advised to add whatever concrete assurances it can that the further implementation of all aspects of the recommendations of the independent Commission will be speedily implemented.