A recruitment freeze at the Health Service Executive is to end today after it was introduced last October.
Its termination was confirmed yesterday by HSE CEO Bernard Gloster.
The embargo was extended in November to include all categories of staff, with the exception of consultants, doctors in training and nurses and midwives who graduated last year.
However, last week the Government announced that the HSE was to be given an extra €1.5 billion in funding.
It said this money is required due to the need for better quality healthcare, the complexity of providing health services and the legacy impact of a post-pandemic and heightened inflationary environment.
Mr Gloster said around 900 equivalent agency full-time posts will be converted to HSE posts this year.
However, he said agency use would only be reduced by €80m this year, not the previously discussed €250m.
“Dependency on agency in 2019 was €423m that has practically doubled to €787m in 2023. We have gone up again slightly on that,” he said.
The HSE CEO also said recruitment limits and controls for regions have been set and cannot be breached.
These mechanisms were implemented in order to avoid previous issues and prevent services from drifting over the limits.
“The limit is now given to a region which includes the hospital and the community which gives a greater chance of responding to the needs of the population and prioritising appropriately,” Mr Gloster said.
He said that “there will only be about ten people in the country authorised to actually put someone onto the payroll system”.
Mr Gloster said the ceiling for recruitment is 125,400 whole-time equivalents, excluding 20,000 in disability, which was set at 31 December 2023.
“And by the end of this year, the affordable ceiling will be 129,700, so it is quite significant. There is about 2,300 new development posts in there also within that money,” he said.
INMO General Secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said lifting the HSE recruitment freeze and new measures to control recruitment limits are “worrying” as there is no mention of patient safety in the details.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, she said: “Our measurements for nursing numbers and midwifery numbers are all based on patient safety measures.
“So, in other words, for patients to be safe we will need one nurse for six patients.
“We breach that on a daily basis in the health service.”
Ms Ní Sheaghdha said the HSE say “they are financed to provide a set number” of staff, which is “based on the 2023 occupied posts”.
She said it takes “a minimum of six months” to recruit a nurse.
“So, at the end of 2023, we had a lot of vacant posts that weren’t filled, so it looks like to us it looks like all of those posts have been removed,” she said.
Ms Ní Sheaghdha said that the letter from the HSE specifies “occupied posts” which, she said, will impact grades like nursing and midwifery.
She said this is because these grades have a high volume of people who are moving jobs, who are moving from place to place.
“They will suffer quite significantly as a result of what was announced yesterday,” she said.
She added that the HSE is not going to retrospectively look at openings.
“What they’re expecting is that in nursing and midwifery, for example, we have an accumulated vacancy of about 2,000 posts,” she said.
“What they’re saying to us is get on with it now and we’ll give you additional posts for new beds that open, but the vacancies that exist, they’re gone,” she added.
Ms Ní Sheaghdha said “it simply is not good enough” to say the 2,000 posts do not exist because “we’re basing our census of December 2023 on occupied posts”.
“It’s an incorrect measure,” she added.
She said the INMO wants an independent oversight of staffing, adding the organisation “wants that from HIQA”.
“We’ve already called for the patient safety licensing bill to be introduced,” she said.
However, she said this “was stalled in 2018”.
Ms Ní Sheaghdha said the bill would give HIQA “power to instruct that patient safety takes precedent over everything else when you’re determining staffing”.
“That’s the only way our system is going to refocus on patient safety and it’s a service that must be delivered by nurses, by midwives, by doctors, by allied health professionals, by healthcare assistance,” she said.
“When you stop focusing on that then, patient safety suffers,” she added.
She said the INMO is meeting the HSE tomorrow “and we expect to have a robust exchange with them”.
Article Source – Health Service Executive recruitment freeze ends today – RTE
