Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Mullingar ambulance drivers set to strike

Mullingar Hospital SIPTU members in the National Ambulance Service (NAS) have served notice of all-out strike action, the union said this week
The strike is set to begin at 8am from Wednesday, 10 August, in a dispute related to their conditions of employment.
The move follows a ballot earlier this month in which SIPTU members in the NAS voted by 92% to 8% in favour of industrial action, up to and including strike action.
Speaking exclusively to Topic, SIPTU Health Division Organiser Paul Bell said that decision for the strike comes after negotiations with the HSE National Ambulance Service (NAS) management have failed to come to fruition. “I have just been informed that NAS management will meet for a preliminary engagement with us on Friday morning. The situation is being compounded because as we said today, the ambulance service is short 561 ambulance professionals – 100 that is was already short and 461 that are identified in the recently published capacity review that was published six weeks ago.”
Mr. Bell said that he wanted to assure the public that any action taken by SIPTU will not impact on emergency calls. “Our members are very determined not to have a dispute against the public or the service users. The dispute is with the employer and it’s all about failure to address issues despite there being mechanisms in place to address these issues.
“We’ve reached the end of it. There’s a few days to go between now and 10 August, so we’ll see what happens.”
Mr. Bell told Topic that there were three main reasons for the strike. “Why we are striking is very simple as far as our members are concerned. They have had three very serious issues which management have failed to engage in with them in any meaningful way. Firstly, money is due to our members having lost salary because of a change under the Public Service Agreement and they cannot get a conclusion to that process for ambulance personnel who are owed money.”
“Secondly we have a binding Labour Court recommendation to deal with the proper resourcing of the intermediate care vehicle service, which is the service used to bring patients to the hospitals for transfers. That’s operated by emergency medical technicians and the service is not being resourced here in manpower or vehicles as obliged under the Labour Court recommendation.”
Mr. Bell said the final reason was that the issue of staff working excessively needs to be tackled. “Under the Public Service Agreement, it was agreed that an annualised hours system would be agreed with ambulance personnel to be sure there was a reliable and efficient service provided to the public, while at the same time the crew would get proper rest and recreation time.” However Mr. Bell said this has yet to materialise.
“There are auxiliary issues, in that there is the ongoing crisis of non-rostered staff, basically ambulance personnel with no fixed base. We believe that issue needs to be addressed.
“And of course we want the roles of ambulance staff and personnel to be reviewed because we believe it is well overdue.”

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