Nursing staff vote on strike plan

Theatre nursing staff have taken part in one ballot about action

Nurses at a South Yorkshire hospital could be about to take industrial action after a long-running staffing dispute with managers came to a head.

Operating theatre staff at Barnsley Hospital have already held an indicative ballot on taking action.

Now a fresh official ballot is being held with a view to taking strike action which would affect pre-planned surgery cases at the site.

Hospital managers said there were "too many chiefs and not enough Indians".

GMB union official Martin Jackson said the trust was aiming to alter the status of some staff and the dispute had been going on for 12 months.

"We had an indicative ballot of 300-plus staff and 96% were in favour of taking action, short of strike action.

"Now, we're holding a formal ballot before we proceed any further and that could include strike action.

"But we have to emphasis that emergency and trauma cases will be dealt with, it's the elective [pre-planned] cases the staff are looking to disrupt."

But the hospital's deputy director of Human Resources Robert Quick said: "In layman's terms we've too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

"We had a glut of deputy ward sisters when what we needed was more staff nurses.

"We are actually proposing an increase overall in the number of nurses we've got in the organisation and that means they're aren't going to be any compulsory redundancies."