Clear: The healthcare association goes into blockade

The Vårdförbundet’s blockade begins at 4 pm on Thursday. Around 63,000 employees will then no longer work overtime and overtime. In addition, there will be a new hiring freeze in the notified occupational groups. This includes, among other things, nurses, midwives, radiology nurses and biomedical analysts.

The blockade applies in all regions as well as at the large hospitals in Stockholm that are run by different companies. It is mainly within planned care that the blockade is expected to have consequences for patients.

– The conflict will mean that we need to reduce certain activities and that there will be longer waiting times for planned care, getting test results and the like, says Martin Myrskog, regional director in Kronoberg, in a press release.

Nothing about working hours

The conflict between Vårdförbundet and the employers in SKR and the employers’ organization Sobona, which includes the hospitals in Stockholm, has its basis in the working hours that apply to the staff.

The union’s main demand in the negotiations for a new agreement has been that the working week should be shortened. Today, many people in the occupational groups in question work 38-hour weeks, according to Sweden’s Radio Ekot, but the Swedish Medical Association believes that it is often considerably more than that, including overtime.

– Our professional groups worked around 3 million hours of overtime last year, every third member regularly works overtime. It clearly shows the system error in Swedish health care, said the Swedish Healthcare Association’s chairwoman Sineva Ribeiro in a press release when the blockade was announced.

SKR: The requirement is not manageable

The employers in SKR, for their part, believe that the Vårdförbundet’s demands are not possible to implement and point to the financially pressured situation in which many regions find themselves.

– Negotiations are based on two parties giving and taking and meeting in a constructive dialogue about possible solutions. Unfortunately, the Vårdförbundet has put more and more comprehensive demands on the table, says Sten Nordin from SKR’s negotiating delegation in a press release.