The Irish Medical Organisation will begin balloting non-consultant hospital doctors today on a proposal to extend industrial action across the State, as a dispute over work rosters intensifies.
The ballot of general membership follows yesterday's one-day work stoppage by non-consultant doctors at Tullamore General Hospital, and comes as Waterford Regional Hospital - already hit by limited industrial action in the paediatric unit - faces an extended work stoppage by all junior doctors from tomorrow.
The Midlands Health Board said all emergency cases were dealt with yesterday. But the Irish Patients Association said 80 patients were deprived of services, including those whose elective surgery was cancelled. It said at least 2,500 people would be affected daily if the dispute went State-wide.
A spokesman criticised the action, saying that notwithstanding the IPA's past support for junior doctors, "patients should not be used as pawns".
About 2,600 of the State's 3,000 hospital doctors are members of the IMO, which expects the balloting to take about three weeks. The IMO and the Health Service Employers Agency continued to exchange blame for the stand-off yesterday, with the former claiming the "dangerous and unworkable" new rosters would reduce training opportunities, and the latter claiming the dispute was a disguised attempt to protect overtime earnings which averaged €45,000 a year.
The HSEA says the rosters are part of the attempt to reduce non-consultant doctors' working hours from the weekly average of 77 to the interim target of the EU's Working Time Directive: 58 by the end of 2004.
But the IMO says the rosters are doing this by taking doctors out of hospitals during the busiest times - from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. - which are also the times of most interactions with consultants, and hence training opportunities.
The organisation's industrial relations director, Mr Fintan Hourihan, said the IMO wanted hospital doctors' working hours reduced "without compromising patient care standards or causing doctors' training standards to suffer". But Mr Brendan Mulligan of the HSEA said the IMO's comments were a "smokescreen" to obscure an exercise in "protecting earnings".
A long-running dispute between the two bodies over how overtime should be defined is to be considered by the Labour Court next month. In the meantime, however, the IMO claims the HSEA has ignored a Labour Court ruling that consultant and non-consultant doctors must approve rosters, as well as a Labour Relations Commission agreement that non-consultants' annual salary is based on the core hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Thursday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday.
The HSEA accepts that the principle of consultation over reductions in working hours, but rejects any suggestion that doctors or hospital managers should have a "veto". The agency also dismisses the IMO's argument that a cut in daytime working hours necessarily involves a reduction in training.
Junior doctors' basic salary scales:*
House officer: €29,351-€41,608
Registrar: €38,388 - €45,882
Senior registrar: €47,999 - €58,781
Specialist registrar: €44,328 - €56,187
*The Health Services Employers Agency puts average annual overtime payments at €45,000.
