About 300 members of the Impact trade union working at Sligo General Hospital are to ballot on industrial action.
The row centres on what the union describes as a ‘number of unilateral decisions by hospital management which are contrary to national agreements and labour court recommendations’.
However, the primary issue is that of automatic sick pay entitlement that Mandate says has been unilaterally ended by management.
Impact official Richy Carrothers said ‘This will mean that administration managers will be making clinical judgements on the validity of sickness and entitlement to sick pay.
‘Our members regard this as an act of hostility, and it would appear that management are intent on manufacturing a dispute. The HSE is, yet again, breaching Labour Court recommendations,’ he said.
In a HSE memo to staff, management at the hospital say that in 2008 Sligo General had an absence rate of 7% at year-end.
While the level was down to 5.2% in February this year, it says the HSE has set a sick-leave target of 3.5% to be achieved by all hospitals.
It has stated that hospitals will not continue to get previous levels of funding to support sick-leave rates over and above 3.5% and the hospital therefore is required to take urgent steps to address this matter.
With effect from May the automatic entitlement to sick pay will be replaced with a mechanism of recommendation/approval for sick pay by line manager/senior managers before sick pay will be processed.
