Health minister insists recruitment freeze won't hit frontline staff amid €250m HSE overspend

HEALTH MINISTER JENNIFER Carroll MacNeill has insisted there is no “threat to recruitment” in the health service a recruitment freeze for frontline HSE staff such as nurses and midwives is not on her “radar”. 

Her comments come after HSE chief executive Anne O’Connor told some regional health managers that recruitment for some non-frontline roles will be paused as the health service is already “significantly over-budget” this year, and “all recruitment must be actively reviewed”.

Priority should be given to “critical posts” rather than automatically replacing vacancies on a like-for-like basis, a memo to managers in the Dublin and south-east regions stated. By the end of March this year, the HSE had already incurred an overspend of €250 million.

Questioned today on whether the HSE is failing to manage its budget under the new health regions system introduced this year, the health minister said that her department is seeing different rates of “agency conversion” across different health regions (which means moving workers from private recruitment agencies onto public sector contracts). 

Carroll MacNeill added that reducing dependence on agency staff needs to be a “focus” for hospitals in all regions. 

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“I think it’s so important that we’re having this conversation in April, not October, so that we’re able to put in place corrections now, not later, to support the transition to the regions,” she said.

Carroll MacNeill was speaking at the annual Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) conference, which is taking place in Dundalk this year. 

The INMO’s director of industrial relations Tony Fitzpatrick today said that the HSE has issued memos in at least three health regions stating that recruitment controls “must be enforced due to continued overspending within the service”. 

“The INMO is clear that embargoes are incredibly damaging to staff and patients alike. Nurses and midwives must be exempt from recruitment controls in all areas,” Fitzpatrick said. 

He added that there are currently over 5,000 vacant nursing and midwifery posts within the HSE. 

“The non-filling of clinically necessary nursing and midwifery posts should not continue to be the norm,” Fitzpatrick said. 

Marie Sherlock, Labour’s spokesperson on health, today said that it is essential that the CEO of the HSE ensures that frontline roles won’t be “in the firing line” when it comes to a recruitment freeze. 

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“Funding controls will only make the backlog worse and exacerbate delayed and unmet levels of care if there is no systems change. I am deeply concerned that it appears that we are now going back to the disaster of the blunt pay and numbers strategy,” she said. 

Carroll MacNeill said that demand on the health service is “significantly up this year” and reforms are being implemented, including the rollout of the public-only consultant contract and changing staff shift patterns in hospitals. 

“I’ve had meetings with the HSE going back many months about the conversion from agency to whole-time equivalents, and about removing barriers within the HSE where there has been slowness, or where there are artificial, bureaucratic barriers – frankly – to making sure that those posts are filled by people on a whole-time equivalent basis, and that we’re reducing spend on agency staff,” the minister said.

“These are logical reforms that have to happen hospital by hospital right across the country, so that we’re not running up additional overtime and allowances costs that we should not be incurring,” she added. 

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