HSE to tell staff of need for further savings

The HSE is expected to tell health service staff this week it is looking to generate more cash savings from the Haddington Road agreement.

Health service management will meet trade unions tomorrow to discuss an implementation plan for the deal which sets out proposals aimed at “delivering the optimum cash extraction” .

A longer working week introduced for staff under the deal provided about five million gross additional hours to the health service. However the HSE told the Government in the implementation plan last week that not all of this could be converted into cash savings and about 2.9 million of the additional hours were being used to deliver increased productivity.

The Department of Health and the HSE are coming under pressures from the Government to generate additional financial savings.

Shortfall of €78m
The health service has told the Government there is likely to be a shortfall of €78 million on the €290 million target set for savings. It has also indicated a target of €108 million for additional, unspecified pay savings, scheduled to be realised this year under its budget, will not be met at all.

The Irish Times reported last week the HSE's financial deficit had doubled to nearly €55 million between January and February. The implementation report, given to the Taoiseach and other senior Ministers last week, says the productivity measures generated as a result of the provision of additional hours – more flexible working practices, extended opening hours, expansion of services – are important to improving quality of services.

However, it also stated work was being undertaken to determine “whether any of these productivity gains can be refocused to ensure an appropriate balance between releasing cash and productivity”. It says the health service was exploring options for converting an element of the 2.9 million hours delivering exclusively productivity gains into cash-releasing hours.

Cross-cover arrangements
Proposals include maximising cash savings, using flexibilities under the Haddington Road deal to reconfigure models of service to maximise efficiencies and using cross-cover arrangements to cover maternity and other leave to deliver cost savings.

The implementation plan says the use of additional hours to release cash savings “will vary significantly across different settings due to the different characteristics such as . . . work and size of teams”.

“The greatest cash-releasing potential is in displacing spending on agency and overtime which generally occur more in services where quality and safety issues dictate minimum staffing levels. Larger organisations/work settings generally offer more opportunity to achieve savings due to a larger pool of staff,” it says.