HSE boss orders freeze on recruitment of managers and administrators

Health Service Executive boss Bernard Gloster has ordered a freeze on the recruitment of managerial and administrative staff as hospitals overspent by almost €150 million in the first two months of the year.

No duration has been specified for the “temporary pause” on the recruitment of managers and administrators and a HSE spokesman said “specific actions” have been taken to “slow” recruitment for the rest of this year.

More than 5,200 management and administrative grades have been added to the health service since December 2019 – one in four of all staff recruited.

The HSE continues to take on managers and administrators at a greater rate than it does doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Over the past three years, more than twice as many staff in these categories have been recruited, compared with doctors.

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About 24,000 whole-time equivalent managers and administrators are employed by the HSE, which says it is continuing to recruit in clinical and other areas.

Candidates who have applied for high-level posts have been told by the HSE that “all normal/routine recruitment at Grade VII and higher is temporarily paused”.

“Consequently this means that this recruitment campaign will now be paused at its current point and therefore your application will not proceed any further for the moment. Unfortunately I am unable to tell you, at this time, when or if the campaign will proceed,” candidates have been told.

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Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane described the rate of hiring of management and administrative grades in the HSE as concerning. “What this data shows me is that it is far easier and quicker to recruit management and administrative staff, and this is why we are seeing these numbers balloon.

“It is much more difficult to recruit frontline healthcare workers because the numbers we need don’t exist.

“That is a failure of workforce planning. Government after government has failed to take health workforce planning seriously. At the same time, many of our young graduates and experienced professionals have moved abroad in recent years to work in better health systems.”

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Hospitals overspent their budget by almost €150 million in just the first two months of the year, a HSE board meeting last March 31st heard. The period was marked by record overcrowding driven by a bad flu season and high levels of Covid-19.

However, the deficit in acute operations of €146 million was partly offset by surpluses in community services (€26.5 million), other operations (€29.9 million) and demand-led services (€1.8 million).

Last week, Ministers were warned of a growing “financial risk” to the Department of Health’s budget, due to an emerging deficit in HSE spending. At the end of 2022, the department needed a €1.4 billion financial bailout, due largely to higher-than-expected spending related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Despite a record €23.7 billion budget this year, the HSE claims this sum could be more than €2 billion short of what it actually needed to run the health service.