THE HEALTH Service Executive should adopt "a bold and innovative" redundancy programme, the Minister for Health and Children,Mary Harney has said.
Speaking during a Dáil debate on cancer services, the Minister said: "If people in areas of administration or management are superfluous to requirements and there are shortages elsewhere, we should take a bold and innovative approach and consider introducing a redundancy programme".
Redundancy packages should have been offered when the HSE was first formed, she said. "However, this approach was not supported politically or by the trade unions."
Redundancy programmes had not generally been offered within the public service, and "may not have been successful" in the organisations where they had. While she acknowledged that staff shortages exist in some quarters, she said the 130,000-strong health service is well-staffed. "Our acute hospitals have one of the highest ratios of staff to beds in the world," she said.
Defending the centralisation of cancer diagnosis into eight hospitals, the Minister just four out of every 100 surgeons were doing more than 50 operations a year until recently. "Three out of every 10 women had their surgery performed by surgeons who did really low volumes of activity," she said.
Meanwhile, health unions said yesterday that the relationship between the HSE and staff representatives was "at a crossroads".
At a meeting yesterday, unions representing more than 100,000 staff said they were concerned that the HSE had been found by the Labour Court to have breached the terms of the national agreement, Towards 2016.
The secretary of the health group of unions, Kevin Callinan of Impact, said they had argued that the HSE would have to demonstrate its commitment to partnership.
Last month, the Labour Court ruled that the HSE had breached the terms of Towards 2016 when it implemented a ban on recruitment last September without consulting staff or their unions.
The HSE said last night it had confirmed its full acceptance of the terms of the Labour Court recommendations and its willingness to put in place a process of ongoing engagement.
Unions at the meeting yesterday also expressed concern about staffing and service restrictions introduced by the HSE in a bid to live within its budget.
However, the meeting did not deal specifically with any measures planned by the HSE to address a potential shortfall of up to €300 million this year.