HOSPITAL chiefs are being faced with a headache over staffing levels during the New Year millennium celebrations.

Regional health service bosses have left it up to Airedale NHS Trust to decide if staff who work over the bank holiday period should get extra cash.

But nursing unions are angry that their staff may miss out because they are already rostered to work as the new millennium dawns.

Giving her monthly update on year 2000 issues, the trust's information and finance director Janet Crouch admitted there was "a gap" between the number of staff on rota and the number needed to cope with the predicted workload.

"It's the staff that don't normally work bank holidays that we're going to have difficulty with," she warned. "Clearly we have to make sure that patients are safe in our hands and if we haven't got the staff it might be difficult to do that."

The trust has not yet decided if it will pay over and above the normal rate for any of its staff, and the Government has said there is no extra money to pay for millennium bonuses.

"The nursing unions will be aggrieved if their staff don't get special payments and others do," staff committee chairman Stephen Fowler told members of the trust board this week.

He added that talks about extra millennium cash with regional NHS managers and the unions had collapsed and it was being left to individual trusts to decide what to do.

"The sooner we can get this sorted out the better," he said. "It's important that we get the issue settled because time is marching on, but I can't see a fair way of doing it."

Trust chief executive Robert Allen warned that if Airedale went ahead and gave staff extra cash it could have a knock-on effect for other trusts.

"Even if we wanted to come to a financial agreement with staff we can't do it in isolation," he said.

And chairman Jill Penn said she could see the new millennium period being pretty hectic.

"It's practically a week of bank holidays so it's important that we get it right," she said.

"I think it's going to be quite a demanding period."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.