Chief executives in voluntary hospitals are seeking a pay rise in a move aimed at restoring a salary link with other senior managers in the public service.
The claim comes at a time when the HSE has been carrying out an examination into whether some hospital boards had increased pay for their top executives without official authorisation.
The trade union Fórsa said it was pursuing a claim on behalf of chief executives in voluntary hospitals, which are known technically as Section 38 organisations.
The union did not set out the amount being sought but said it wanted to re-establish “the original pay relationship” with other senior roles.
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A hearing took place at the Workplace Relations Commission earlier this month.
Voluntary hospital staff are considered to be public service personnel and are paid in line with Government pay policy. However, such Section 38 organisations have their own boards and are not run by the HSE.
A spokesman for Fórsa said historically, the pay of voluntary hospital chief executives was linked to those in senior grades elsewhere in the public service.
He said they did not necessarily receive equivalent rates, but their pay was expressed as a percentage of a recognised senior grade.
“When the HSE was created, consolidating the then eight health boards, the senior pay structures were reviewed, and the established pay link effectively broken,” the union said.
The union said in 2006 the then review body on higher remuneration in the public service recommended pay rises for a number of HSE managerial grades.
In September 2006 the Government approved a 4 per cent pay rise for HSE assistant national directors in finance, ICT, human resources and shared services backdated to January 2005. There were a number of other rises put in place to apply on a staggered basis from other dates in 2005 and 2006.
Overall the starting point on the pay scale increased from just under €75,000 in December 2004 to €88,520 in June 2006.
Fórsa said these increases only applied to HSE employees and were not paid to chief executives in voluntary hospitals despite the established salary link.
“Fórsa’s objective is to re-establish the original pay relationship for this group, and to ensure consistency with the fully-funded nature of Section 38 arrangements (staff pay linked to HSE terms and conditions). Aside from the need for both fairness and consistency, this has implications for the recruitment and retention at this level in the voluntary hospitals,” the union said.
Pay rates for CEOs in the voluntary hospital sector have been a contentious issue of concern for some time.
In 2015, the government introduced new salary bands that reduced rates for existing chief executives by up to 10 per cent for existing staff and by 25 per cent for those being taken on.
The hospitals and business group Ibec has argued this created recruitment and retention difficulties.
Last year, The Irish Times revealed St John’s Hospital in Limerick had moved pay for its chief executive, Emer Martin, into a higher band, meaning it was non-compliant with public pay scales. Officially the rate for the role at St John’s was set at between €99,829 and €106,866. However, the board in 2023 agreed to move the post on to a band with a scale of between €119,571 and €140,747.
The hospital maintained it acted in “good faith to avoid the risk of losing the CEO” and without the rise she would have earned less than the deputy chief executive.
The HSE subsequently demanded the pay rate was restored to approved levels and warned there could be consequences for planned developments if pay policy was breached.
The Department of Public Expenditure later sought the HSE to examine CEO pay elsewhere, following which three further hospitals were deemed to be non-compliant with their rate of pay.
