The dispute focuses on the 'continuing absence' of a 2025-2026 pay award for HSC nursing staff in Northern Ireland.

RCN says it has ‘made it clear' that its members are ‘not prepared to tolerate' a repetition of their experiences in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, when a pay award for staff working in the HSC on Agenda for Change terms and conditions was not confirmed for several months after it had been awarded elsewhere across the UK. The uplift was not paid until the very end of the financial year, RCN adds.

Professor Rita Devlin, RCN Northern Ireland executive director, said: ‘Nursing and other healthcare staff in Northern Ireland are once again on the brink of stepping out of pay parity with colleagues across the UK. We have worked tirelessly to try and ensure that this does not happen again, but there has been a failure in some political quarters to listen.

‘Our members do not understand why, yet again, they are being treated by their own Executive as second-class citizens and why, every year, the need to formulate a modest pay offer appears to catch the Executive unprepared. The issue of pay should be accounted for in every year's budget and a failure to do this is a failure of government.'

Mike Nesbitt, Minister of Health for Northern Ireland, says he wants to see the recommended health service pay awards implemented as soon as possible.

He has previously said: ‘My Ministerial Direction on proceeding without delay with the health pay uplifts will in the first instance go to the finance minister for consideration.

‘I fully acknowledge the many competing and significant pressures piling up in the finance minister's in-tray. I also acknowledge that years of underfunding by the UK Government have greatly limited his options.

‘I trust he and other Executive colleagues will respond positively to the position I have set out on pay. The only way through our financial challenges is by working collectively together, agreeing strategic priorities that will produce better outcomes.'