Nurses, midwives start industrial action today

Disgruntled nurses and midwives will be taking industrial action today to protest against the shortage of staff and the continuing failure to provide staff meals.

Nurses are also livid that the professional warrant, which had been promised to them in the collective agreement signed a year ago, has never materialised.

From today they will be refusing to carry out any non-nursing duties, including clerical work, and the directives are not likely to be lifted until the pending issues are ironed out.

These are the first set of directives in a series of three that will lead to a full strike, affecting services in all hospitals and health centres if the government remains complacent, the president of the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses, Paul Pace said.

Reacting to the directives, the government criticised the action, saying the union was causing hardship to patients for frivolous and senseless reasons and denied it was not honouring the collective agreement.

"We cannot continue with a parody where unions order their members to carry out half their duties and expect a full salary," the government said although a Social Policy Ministry spokesman added this did not mean nurses and midwives would have their salaries reduced.

The ministry appealed to nurses and midwives to honour their professional obligations while keeping patients as their top priority.

Mr Pace said the directives should not have adverse effects on patients because nurses and midwives will have more time to spend with patients. The directives meant they would stop doing non-nursing duties, including clerical work.

The union feels the government is not addressing the problem of staff shortages, with bureaucracy making it extremely difficult to retain retiring nurses and University courses restricting the number of admissions.

However, the ministry said it was up to the University to decide on courses while the bureaucracy the union mentioned was simply the present legal scenario that regulates all government employees.

The ministry said it was doing its utmost to employ workers in the health sector.

Although the union originally favoured the government's plan to employ foreign nurses as a stop-gap measure to address shortages, it was now making a U-turn and opposed this, the ministry added.

A second issue concerns staff meals at Mater Dei Hospital, which were suspended last month after a nurse reported finding the severed head of a mouse in her food. Earlier this month, the catering company was taken to court for breaching food safety regulations.

But even though the government gave hospital staff an allowance, this is deemed unacceptable by both doctors and nurses who find it difficult to get a meal.

The union is now calling for a long-term manpower plan on how the government plans to cater for new developments in the health sector, including the planned reform in primary healthcare.

"We cannot continue with crisis management. The government needs to state where it intends to get the necessary people from," Mr Pace said.

The government, on the other hand, says it wants a manpower plan which does not deal solely with numbers but analyses the work carried out by each category of workers.

Mr Pace said the union was not requesting any meetings and would only lift the actions once decisions start being implemented.

"The government needs to put its house in order," he insisted.

In another statement last night, the MUMN said that before the last general election the government had accepted the fact that there was a shortage of nurses. But now it was going against the grain.

Patients are experiencing difficulties through the shortage on which the government does not want to budge.

The government should not use the issue of the regulator as a ruse not to take the required steps. The union said it will not be intimidated or threatened by the government because its directives are legitimate.