LONDON — Medical appointments were canceled, hospital units shut down and some ambulance responses were delayed in Northern Ireland on Wednesday, when thousands of nurses staged short strikes in a long-running dispute over pay and patient safety.
About 9,000 nurses represented by the Royal College of Nursing, a labor union, left their jobs for 12 hours — the first walkout in the group’s 103-year history. About 6,000 nurses belonging to Unison, a public employee union, joined the protest, and were planning to stay away for a full day.
The nurses are demanding that the government-run health care system raise their pay to equal their counterparts in the rest of the United Kingdom, and hire more nurses to address inadequate staffing that they say creates unsafe conditions.
“With around 2,800 vacant nursing posts in the Health Service Care, record levels of money being spent on agency staff to plug gaps and nurses’ pay sliding further and further behind the rest of the U.K., our members have had enough,” said Pat Cullen, director of the Royal College of Nursing.
“The concerns of nurses were raised again and again over a number of years, but this has continued to fall on deaf ears,” she added.
Northern Ireland’s health care services are on the brink of collapse because of chronic underfunding that has gone unresolved for years. While the health system across Britain is under strain, the problems in Northern Ireland are particularly acute because, for almost three years, there has not been a functioning government in Belfast to make policy decisions, including pay raises for the public sector workers.
Critical services like cancer care, mental health and emergency care are struggling to cope, while waiting lists have expanded to record levels. Currently, 30,000 people are waiting to see a senior physician and many people face yearslong waits for elective procedures like hip and knee replacements.
The region has also been confronting a suicide crisis, caused by poverty, a lack of mental health resources, a recent uptick in paramilitary violence and post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans of Northern Ireland’s three-decade-long guerrilla war. Only about 5 percent of Northern Ireland’s health budget is spent on mental health, compared to 13 percent in England.
“The stark reality is that the Northern Ireland health service is falling behind the rest of the U.K.,” said Simon Hoare, the chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in Parliament. “An approach to funding that simply keeps things ticking over, and an absence of overarching strategy in key areas, has left services at the breaking point and this situation must end as soon as possible.”
The committee urged the central government in London to intervene, should Northern Ireland’s power vacuum continue.
Nurses in Northern Ireland earn up to $5,000 a year less than their counterparts in England and Wales, according to the Royal College of Nursing, which says that many nurses are now thinking of leaving the profession because of the increased pressures caused by staffing shortages.
A day before Wednesday’s job action, leaders from Northern Ireland’s five main parties met with David Sterling, the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, who has been forced to manage daily affairs in the absence of local government ministers. They voiced their collective support for the restoration of pay parity for nurses, the BBC reported.
Britain’s nursing unions agreed last year to a three-year, 6.5 percent pay raise, but it could not be applied in Northern Ireland because of the lack of a functioning government there.
Marie Kelly, a trainee nurse who participated in a demonstration in Belfast on Wednesday morning, said that nurses did not want to put patients at risk. But they had to do something, she said, because without any action the problems would only get worse.
“If nothing is done, patients will face much bigger life-threatening risks,” she said in a telephone interview. “This is a real emergency. We were left with no choice.”
Source : Nytimes
