Salary cuts for new entrant consultants must be reversed

The 40 per cent salary cuts for new entrant consultants that were announced by the Minister for Health, without any consultation, in September 2012 have proved a “catastrophe” in terms of recruitment, consultants at the IMO AGM heard. Prof Seán Tierney told members at the National Consultants Meeting in Maynooth that to ask people in their late 30s and 40s, who had spent nearly 20 years training, to come back and take up posts with such terms and conditions was simply “non-viable”. “Doctors were the only group singled out who, when moving from one grade to another within the public…