Extending a recruitment pause to frontline healthcare staff is “not on my radar”, Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has said after other measures were introduced in the health service to curb overruns.
The Irish Times recently reported on the pausing of recruitment in non-frontline roles across significant parts of the State under new measures to deal with overspending, which hit €250 million for the first quarter of the year.
Health Service Executive chief Anne O’Connor told her senior management team in a memo on Tuesday that the organisation was now “significantly over budget”. She said the HSE’s financial position had “significantly worsened” over recent weeks.
Under the measures, three HSE regions – Dublin and South East, Dublin Midlands and the South West – have been placed in what is known as tier three escalation, which will involve the introduction of employment controls and greater scrutiny on spending.
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Unions had voiced concerns that this move could be a precursor to a wider recruitment embargo that would affect clinical, frontline staff.
Asked if such a move was imminent, the Minister said her focus was on converting from agency to full-time, permanent staff.
“It is not on my radar that we would be pausing frontline recruitment or clinical staff in any way,” she said at the annual Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation conference in Dundalk on Thursday.
According to Carroll MacNeill, there are two key drivers for the overspend – reliance on agency staff and an increased strain on services.
“Demand is significantly up this year. We’ve had about 7,500 additional people [aged] over 75 attend our emergency departments,” she said.
“And as we overspend on agency [services], we are forgetting, and not filling in a speedy enough way, the vacant, whole-time equivalent positions; the permanent positions in the healthcare system. I am trying to work with healthcare systems to convert agency work as much as possible to permanent positions.”
She wants to remove the “artificial, bureaucratic barriers” that exist when trying to convert those agency staff, she added.
Carroll MacNeill said, however, the “most important thing” for assisting with staying within budget was the implementation of reforms.
“The implementation of the public only consultants contract, seeing people in outpatient [services], making sure that the time nursing staff start is aligned to the time that theatre staff starts – these are logical reforms that have to happen hospital by hospital right across the country so we’re not running up additional overtime and allowance costs that we should not be incurring,” she said.
Carroll MacNeill said she wanted to secure multiannual funding for the health service, but “in order to do that, we have to demonstrate the HSE is in charge of its budget, that the department is in charge of its budget”.
