Restrictions on staff numbers cost health board €1 million

Employment ceiling: The North Eastern Health Board has claimed that the Government's ceiling on staff numbers in the health service is costing it €1 million a year by forcing it to employ agency nurses who are far more expensive.

In a letter to the Department of Health last month, the chief executive of the North Eastern Health Board, Mr Paul Robinson, urged that the restrictions on employing full-time healthcare staff be eased.

"The ceiling on employment numbers, which has necessitated the recruitment of agency staff to cover demand- led service pressures, is resulting in an increased cost of 35 per cent for agency nurses above the comparative 2003 period," Mr Robinson wrote in the letter.

He said a review of the employment ceiling would allow savings to be made through the recruitment of staff "rather than through the hiring of the very expensive agency alternative".

"On the basis of current expenditure, a saving of €1 million per annum would be achieved if the current agency staff were replaced by recruited staff," Mr Robinson told the Department of Health.

The North Eastern Health Board chief said health authorities had to pay VAT on agency staff costs.

"The net effect of this is the transfer of funds from the health vote back to the Revenue Commissioners through a series of bureaucratic processes," he said.

Earlier this month, The Irish Times revealed that the chief executive of the Eastern Regional Health Authority, which funds and oversees services in Dublin, Wicklow and Kildare, also expressed concern at the impact of the Government employment ceiling.

The North Eastern Health Board currently has 6,960 staff.

However, Mr Robinson told the Department of Health that increased demand for services and enhanced service provision in the acute sector had affected its capacity to remain within the employment ceiling.

"Efforts to reduce staff numbers to the ceiling continue to be hampered by the levels of emergency admissions experienced in our hospitals," he said.

Mr Robinson told the Department of Health the North Eastern Health Board recorded a deficit of €7.7 million in the first six months of the year and forecast that this could reach €15 million by the end of the year.

This will be offset by a contingency fund put in place by the board at the start of the year.

However, Mr Robinson warned that while this fund currently had a balance of €10 million, this was likely to be reduced to €8 million by the end of the year.