Health Minister maintains nurses’ protests not affecting healthcare

Health Min­is­ter Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe says re­cent demon­stra­tions by nurs­es and health­care work­ers over pro­posed re­duc­tions to over­time rates have not dis­rupt­ed ser­vices across the pub­lic health­care sys­tem.

Re­spond­ing to a ques­tion in the Sen­ate from Dr Amery Browne, Dr Bo­doe said the protests had “no ad­verse im­pact” on health­care de­liv­ery.

He said Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties ac­ti­vat­ed con­tin­gency mea­sures to main­tain con­ti­nu­ity of care dur­ing the demon­stra­tions.

“These in­clud­ed the re­as­sign­ment of staff, strate­gic de­ploy­ment of nurs­ing per­son­nel and tar­get­ed ad­just­ments to du­ty ros­ters,” Dr Bo­doe said.

He added that im­ple­men­ta­tion was close­ly mon­i­tored, with ad­di­tion­al staffing ad­just­ments made where nec­es­sary to en­sure ser­vice stan­dards were main­tained.

Speak­ing on In­ter­na­tion­al Nurs­es Day, the health min­is­ter al­so thanked nurs­es for their “un­wa­ver­ing ded­i­ca­tion, pro­fes­sion­al­ism and com­pas­sion in car­ing for our pop­u­la­tion.”

Asked whether the dis­pute over over­time rates had been re­solved, Dr Bo­doe said the mat­ter re­mained un­der con­sid­er­a­tion.