After a brief strike action this week, health care worker unions prepared to tell hospital employees to go back to work after the Supreme Court’s constitutional branch decided Thursday to provisionally allow the director and two top administrators of San José’s Calderón Guardia Hospital to resume their posts.
Last week, the Social Security System sacked hospital director, Luis Paulino Hernández, administration chief Carlos Vílchez and maintenance chief Fernando Roldán after an investigation found they neglected internal control regulations during a July 2005 fire that raged through the hospital’s fourth and fifth floors, killing 19 people (TT, July 15, 2005).
The health unions said the suspensions broke due process and labor laws, and called an “indefinite strike.”