Audits will check health staff have enough to do

DEPARTMENT OF Health managers are to be audited annually to ensure that they and their staff have enough work to do.

Principal officers in the department will be required to confirm that all their staff are appropriately employed, under an action plan prepared by the department.

The plan was drawn up in response to a critical assessment of the department under the Government’s Organisational Review Programme (ORP).

The assessment found that some staff were overwhelmed with work, while others had little or nothing to do. It also called for greater clarity in the respective roles of the department and the HSE.

The department’s response, in the form of an action plan, has been endorsed by the Minister for Health, Mary Harney, and is being implemented immediately.

The department said it accepted the ORP report and saw it as a “valuable opportunity” to improve its performance. However, it claimed that many of the problems identified also existed in other Government departments and organisations.

It also said that the nature and degree of the media and political spotlight under which it operated was an important feature of work in the department.

“This reflects the importance of the health sector in the everyday life of people in this country and is probably true of health departments in other countries.”

The department describes its plan as ambitious but realistic, with a limited number of priority actions that can be delivered quickly.

The designers of the plan say it is neither possible nor appropriate to demarcate entirely separate roles for the department and HSE.

“However, there is a need to delineate better the department’s distinctive role and functions, to communicate how they differ from those of the HSE and other agencies within the health sector, and to take appropriate actions to ensure that in future we focus more on the delivery of these distinctive functions.”

Five years after the HSE was set up, the plan envisages the development of a memorandum of understanding between the department and the HSE. This was a key recommendation of the ORP report.

The Department of Health said “cultural change” was needed for people to accept that effective human resources management was a core part of what it did, so that this was not seen as a diversion from “real” work. It said good management practices were in operation but that these were not being applied consistently.

The plan envisages “a more equitable and flexible distribution of resources” across the department to deal with periodic peaks and troughs in workloads.

Some functions will be centralised and staff will be redeployed on a temporary or part-time basis. When the Dáil is in recess, staff will be taken off answering parliamentary questions to do other work.

However, significant resources will continue to be devoted to ministerial advice.

The department employs 433 staff, a reduction of 118 on staff numbers in December 2004. However, at that time, before the HSE was founded, it had responsibility for the entire health service.

Last year, 56 staff left under an early retirement scheme, normal retirement or redeployment to other departments. A further 40 posts are due to go by 2012.