Mr. Paul Bell:

The HSE is now working on a return to work protocol and yet Covid-19 will still exist in the community and in the health service. Some big challenges will present in regard to the protocol. Because of underlying issues, some health workers may be told there is no work for them to return to. This is a big question we will need to consider for all grades, including nursing, midwifery, the ambulance service, support service and healthcare assistants. That is the complex conversation we will need to get into. At the end of the day if Covid-19 still exists, health workers with underlying health issues must be facilitated and protected. It may not be as easy as reassigning them to another post. The policymakers need to grapple with this matter.

On occupational health, some EU states already see Covid-19 as an occupational disease. Given that 35% of all cases of Covid-19 in our country relate to health workers, we do not know why there is such resistance and why it is not seen as an occupational disease.

To assist those working in the community, home care support assistants and home helps, my union, SIPTU, got to the stage where we had to source face masks for our members to try to shake up the system so that the HSE would respond to those workers in particular because some colleagues going to the homes of service users were being granted PPE while people in support staff or health care assistant grades were finding it much more difficult to procure that particular type of safety equipment. We had to take those steps to protect our members. At this stage, it seems that members are receiving PPE even though there have been issues with the availability and obviously the quality of the equipment, an issue the HSE has been trying to correct.