Health service unions mull protests and ballots on industrial action over HSE hiring curbs

Unions representing 140,000 health workers are to meet on Monday to consider a campaign of protests and ballots on industrial action as they seek to step up their opposition to restrictions on hiring in the Health Service Executive.
Leading officials from the unions representing a broad range of health service workers including doctors, nurses, administrative and other staff, say the HSE has failed to engage with them on staffing issues since July.
Nurses’ representatives say the issue is a threat to patient safety with 2,000 vacancies unfilled across the acute hospital and community sectors but the HSE has said it is employing more people than ever before with substantial growth in recent years, also noting that it has to operate within budget.
The unions have been involved in internal deliberations on what action is open to them in recent weeks and representatives of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), Siptu, Fórsa, the Irish Medical Organisation, as well as Connect, Unite and the Medical Laboratory Scientist Association will now decide on what action to propose to members.
The INMO’s Albert Murphy, who chairs the group of unions, said in the absence of meaningful engagement with employers, the unions are likely to set out plans for protests and a timetable for balloting members on industrial action.
“What form that action might take is something we will have to discuss,” he said.
The meeting comes a day before the national council of the Psychiatric Nurses Association is scheduled to decide what form its industrial action planned for next week will take.
In both instances, the contents of the HSE’s pay and numbers strategy (PNS), published during the summer, and the ceiling it sets on staffing levels is a central issue.
The document set the number of whole-time equivalent staff to be employed at 125,420, its level at the end of 2023, but the unions say several thousand vacant roles at that time have been “suppressed” as a result. Mr Murphy said there was a legal obligation on the HSE to consult staff representatives before the numbers were finalised.
“Under the information and consultation directive and our agreements with them, they were supposed to engage with us with a view to reaching agreement, not simply make an announcement,” he said.
Instead, he said, recruitment has virtually ground to a halt again over the past couple of months leaving acute hospitals and community service managers to juggle resources.
“We have commitments on safe staffing but in one hospital where the required staffing levels were finally put in place some of the nurses had to be moved after 10 days and so it was gone again. We know from experience that any freeze on recruitment of nurses can take years to recover from and it makes a joke of safe staffing. It’s a very blunt instrument that is being used here and what our research shows is that some of the calculations it is based on are actually flawed.”
In response to a request for comment, the HSE said it continues to engage with unions “on a range of issues” and “recruitment is taking place within each of the six health service regions which now have their specific allocations in accordance with the Pay and Numbers Strategy which was finalised earlier this summer. The recruitment embargo was in place because we over recruited beyond funded levels. It was then lifted when the Pay and Numbers strategy was agreed.”
In July, HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster told senior managers that staffing was “now at a level not previously seen and continues to grow”.
The HSE previously said “it is not in breach of its legislative requirements regarding consultation. We at all times advised the unions that as soon as the PNS was finalised we would update them on all aspects of it. We have done that. The HSE has increased its workforce by over 25,700 since January 2020 (excluding disability services) to support delivery of services.”