{"id":188920,"date":"2025-10-09T20:48:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T20:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/188920\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T20:48:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T20:48:24","slug":"nurses-pay-rcn-to-begin-balloting-members-for-strike-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/188920\/","title":{"rendered":"Nurses’ pay: RCN to begin balloting members for strike action"},"content":{"rendered":"

In May the health minister signed off \u00a3200m to go towards this year’s pay deal<\/a> but said the money would need to be found outside his department due to financial pressure he is already facing.<\/p>\n

Health pay is a devolved matter in Northern Ireland. <\/p>\n

In recent years health workers have engaged in strike action over failure to implement the annual pay award.<\/p>\n

Last month, Mike Nesbitt said that he doesn’t see a fix for this issue outside of the executive working together collaboratively and that he would not point the finger at other ministers for the failure so far to find the money.<\/p>\n

Speaking in the Northern Ireland Assembly on Monday, Nesbitt said he was “not just as convinced” now that those discussions would end positively.<\/p>\n

“I am less optimistic now than I was a couple of weeks ago, but I still think it’s going to be resolved,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Even if it does lead to strike action – and I pray to God it does not – at some point this pay issue will have to be resolved and I think if we allow it to go to strike action it will have an impact on service delivery, waiting lists, staff morale and the bottom line is when it is resolved, it will cost more to sort out than it costs today.”<\/p>\n

The minister added that he understands the RCN is due to hold a “key” meeting this Thursday where he anticipated the option of strike action being “rubber stamped” by the union.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In May the health minister signed off \u00a3200m to go towards this year’s pay deal but said the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-188920","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}