THE HSE HAS launched a national and international recruitment campaign to recruit  consultants for the Irish health service, urging many healthcare workers abroad to return home.

The new campaign centres on the new public consultant contract and aims to fill 400 vacancies this year.

International ad campaigns will take place across the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, with tag lines like: ‘You found yourself in North Sydney, now find your roots in South Dublin’.

The HSE’s national director of HR, Anne Marie Hoey, has said that the campaign will be targeting people working in Ireland and internationally, both those who trained in Ireland, and new staff from other countries.

“We want to develop awareness of the variety of consultant posts available in Ireland, and make eligible clinicians aware that the new, generously remunerated consultant contract is live,” she said.

“There is a global shortage of healthcare workers at the moment, and a fiercely competitive market. As a result, many international health systems around the world are seeking to address this shortage by recruiting from abroad, including the HSE.”

The campaign will commence internationally across print media, social media and digital media.

“We hope to build on the HSE’s well-established international recruitment practice, with competitive relocation packages, that has welcomed in excess of 20,000 people, including 3,500 internationally recruited nurses over the last two years,” Hoey added.

Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, welcomed the campaign’s launch, saying: 

“The new consultant contract is central to our drive toward universal healthcare and delivering for our growing and aging population the health services they need. I am confident that specialist doctors throughout the world, both those trained in Ireland and elsewhere, will see the benefits of this new contract and grasp the opportunity it presents.”

Last month it was revealed that the HSE had continued to recruit nurses from Zimbabwe, Ghana and Nigeria for over a month after they were added to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) no-recruit list. 

The WHO keeps a list of countries with the most vulnerable health workforces to ensure more developed countries don’t poach from those systems already facing critical staff shortages.

A HSE spokesperson said that recruitment stopped “when the relevant unit in the HSE was aware that Zimbabwe, Ghana and Nigeria had been added to the list”.