SINCE LAUNCHING LESS than a week ago, over 60,000 people have registered for the HSE’s recruitment drive aimed at helping the health service cope with outbreak of the coronavirus.

For some doctors and nurses who’ve applied, the first job interviews are already under way and the HSE has asked those who’ve registered to bear with them as they sort through the applications.

At present, the priority is recruiting healthcare professionals who are not currently providing health care already and who are available to work immediately. 

HSE national director of human resources Anne Marie Hoey said: “We want to thank all who have been in contact to assist our health services in answering the call in such numbers through the ‘Be on Call for Ireland’ initiative. 

The HSE are now analysing all the information from the registrations, and we ask for your continued patience. If you have registered, we may be in contact, please bear with us.

It is currently working through a shortened selection process which includes interviews and checking a candidate’s professional registration.

This process began on Friday but the HSE said it is a “changing, complex environment and a challenging task”. 

“Our priority is to build capacity to meet a demand that we are working to assess,” Hoey said. “We may not know where the jobs are so we cannot give this information yet. We are focusing on getting new staff ‘job ready’ so they can meet the demand as it arises.”

Within the 60,000 applications are a large number of healthcare professionals currently working part time in the health service.

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The HSE asks those people to discuss with their manager how they can increase their hours to improve capacity across the health services as “all our services will be needed in the weeks to come”. 

At the time of writing, there are 906 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ireland but that is expected to rise above 1,000 when the Department of Health releases the latest figures this evening.

Efforts from public health authorities here have centred on “flattening the curve” which would prevent the health service being overwhelmed by patients with the virus.