“As an NHS employee, I have definitely seen a significant impact,” says Rodney Doherty, when asked how a lack of a legislative Government in Northern Ireland has affected him. Working as a Domestic Assistant at the South West Acute Hospital, Rodney explains:

“Where there was previously a nursing crisis, with a shortage of nurses, there is now a staffing crisis in general. It is very much fuelled by poor pay which is affected by the lack of Stormont because we don’t have anyone to sort out a budget, let alone make a pay offer.”

He continued: “We have been, for far too many years, the lowest paid staff in the whole of the NHS across the UK and its definitely having a really poor impact.”

“The band one staff, now at the top of the band, are making minimum wage because minimum wage kept going up and our pay really didn’t move at all.”

Rodney feels that this has had a “very poor impact on morale.” He states: “We still work very hard, but we aren’t getting paid properly.” He commented on how this has affected him personally: “You’re more squeezed financially, as everything goes up in price and your money doesn’t change, it just leaves you with less.”

Rodney believes that this issue is affecting NHS employees across the board. He said: “It’s not just Domestics but all sorts of staff are leaving in droves to anywhere that they can get more money, which again has a negative impact. When you can’t get staff, you can’t provide services.”

Commenting on the absence of the MLAs and the affect it has had on the funding issues, Rodney said: “Anything positive gets put on the backburner because there is no one to give us funding, no one to give us a pay rise.”

He did note that they managed to get a one per cent pay rise without the MLAs but that it took “a really long time” and unfortunately it wasn’t a positive outcome for everyone. He explained:

“It had a bad impact because some people were moved into a higher pension contribution bracket and then because it took so long for the pay to come through, they owed a lot of back money in contributions to their pension scheme.”

When asked what is the minimum that he expects to be done about the current pay situation, Rodney said: “I don’t think that we should have anything less than what the NHS England got. There has been pay disparity for too many years and we have argued that pay parity should be restored because we are all doing the same work, so why are some getting more pay for it than others? It’s not fair.”

He continued: “Everywhere now, not just nursing, there’s a lot of jobs that can’t be filled because the money is so poor that people don’t want it. There’s a lot of agency staff in use currently.”

He believes that there needs to be a focus on the NHS in general and the crisis with funding. “Last October it was dire; the predictions of how much they were going to be short and how they were going to have to find this funding somewhere. It was just horrendous.”

“There was no-one to stand up and say, well look this is unacceptable, this can’t happen,” stated Rodney on the lack of support and representation for Northern Irish NHS employees through these discussions due to the Stormont stalemate.

On a final note, he stated: “There has to be a positive change for the NHS, certainly in Northern Ireland, because it’s currently in really poor shape.”

He passionately urges the MLA’S to get back to work, or if they can’t manage it, they should get someone else who can. “We deserve better!” he exclaimed.