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THERE WILL BE an “unavoidable reduction” in health services following the retirements of thousands of workers, Minister James Reilly has said.
The health minister said the most recent information indicates that around 4,200 staff will have left the service between September last year and the end of this month. This corresponds to roughly 3,700 full-time jobs, he said.
But Reilly rejected suggestions from Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin that there would be “huge difficulties” in the HSE following the retirements.
“There will be an unavoidable reduction in services this year,” he said, but added he was “satisfied sufficient arrangements are in place to proactively manage the transition”.
“There is no way we’re going to have an unsafe service,” Reilly told the Dáil this afternoon.
He said a ‘transition team’ was already in place and he had met with key HSE directors last night on how to manage the impact of retirements.
Emergency departments, maternity and neo-natal care, and intensive care units would be prioritised as “areas of high risk” as the HSE copes with the reduced staffing, he said, adding that some key positions would be “backfilled” after people retire.
Reilly added that there was “an onus” on staff and managers to be “as innovative and flexible as possible.” “A service can be delivered with different types of rosters and different types of skill mixes than we currently have,” he said.
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So an already stretched service is to become even more thinly spread. Great. As for managers becoming innovative, that’s cop out speech for ‘I have no idea how people will cope but that’s not my problem’
if they could make people redundant this could have been a lot more successful. that way you could get rid of the people that are actually surplus to requirements instead of losing key members of frontline staff, such as midwives and nurses. the way they have done it is a mess
The issues not with admin staff who are admittedly coming out the HSE’s ears, the issue lies with medical staff or lack thereof. Nurses & doctors needing to be more ‘flexible’, ie work 36 hour days instead of 24 but make no mistakes or errors????? It’s not possible. I work an average 8 hour day & I’m tired by the end of it, is it plausible that medical staff can do more with less people & longer hours? I think not. I’ve been in the public system (I’ve since moved to private thank you kindly!) but I can testify that’s it’s a zoo! And only getting worse.
Thank you Eimear, we do the best we can with the shite we’re handed by our “masters” but I’m sick of this fool being told by those who actually do the jobs whats happening and he denies it, he’s all over the media for the past few weeks saying “not at all, don’t listen to this doctor or that nurse things will be fine, I have a cunning plan”. The reality is things won’t be fine, the Health System in this country is imploding, everyone knows it except the fool running it. Well Baldrick, just like your namesake none of your plans will work. We have a better chance of oil sprouting from the Spire on O’Connell Street and Enda winning the Euro millions every week. Not gonna happen.
I just wonder what its going to take for this fool to realise, we’re already cancelling planned operations, we keep ambulances at A&E’s as long as possible (we don’t want them bringing in the patients too quickly). What next? “If you have to attend a hospital please bring in some medication, bandages, band-aids, pillows, sheets etc, you may not need them but someone will” Everything possible is already charged through the nose for, although I’m sure the fools in charge will still surprise us with something else.
Well I was in Vincent’s for 3 days in a & e; no bed. I’m an epileptic & was seizing in an open a & e ‘ward’ at times because there just wasn’t the nurses or space in recovery to properly take care of me.
I’ve very bad veins & the IV’s would burst sometimes so there was blood on my sheets which weren’t changed Also, when you seize its a muscular motion so you sweat obviously & I wasn’t allowed shower either. Eventually a nurses aid changed my bedding on the 3rd day when I refused to get into bed until I had showered & had my bed clothes changed.
I’m sorry to hear about your trouble Eimear, I’ve bad veins myself so I share your pain, so to speak. Seriously though I can see things like this happening more and more as nurses, doctors etc become more scarce. I expect to hear that more and more “non nursing duties” will be piled onto ancillary staff, porters, cleaners etc who’ll be given a speech about how everyone just has to pull together in this time of need. Seriously don’t be surprised next year to see a cleaner change your IV, I’ve already seen some things that 5 or 6 years would have someone hauled up but now, nobody blinks an eye. Maybe you should have had someone bring in your own sheets…. lol.
I agree.
lives at stake now
You have to break some eggs to make an omelette.
If you want a better more efficient health service in this country you have to do away with the administrative bloat. Less civil “servants” means less bureaucratic red tape.
Once these people are retired and out of the way we’ll be leaner and it will be easier to change the way things have been done.
It’s lead, follow, or get out of the way… and thankfully they are getting out of the way.
Hi Eoin, problem is the people leaving are not the admin bloat. I agree that the staff levels are off the chart, but seems like we are losing the people who actually provide treatment.
@Eoin O’Duffy and while we wait for the retirements how many of us the patient will survive ……. SHAMEFUL DISGRACEFUL………….
Eoin, have you ever worked in a hospital? I think if you did you wouldn’t think it’s that simple to shed staff
This sickens me, I have a very good colleague working with me who is a qualified Doctor from India with a MSc in molecular medicine and a PhD in nanomedicine from Trinity College Dublin and who has attained the right to retrain in the UK. Of course his application to the Irish Medical Board is refused on the basis that his medical education is not to the same standard as the Irish institutions. On top of this he was asked to do an English proficiency exam, even though he had submitted both the MSc and PhD thesis…apparently only RCSI thesis submissions are accepted as having the adequate handle of the language!!!! His medical education was never an issue with the Irish Medical Board when he applied to them 5 years ago prior to venturing into the science world of research. He is now at home without a full time job and his expertise of working in A&E and additionally as a GP for over 10 years is going to waste. He came to Ireland initially to advance his career and all he has been faced with is red tape after red tape!!! And this government have the cheek to say that they are being stretched when I’m pretty sure he’s not the only able person in Ireland wanting to carry on their career in medicine!!!
whats teh breakdown on people leaving – how many nurses, doctors, administrators, etc. etc. then we’ll know wheres likely to be hardest hit. are they releasing these figures ? it is possible that the figures are not known too !
Can we have that in writing mr Reilly , sorry don’t bother it wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on .
Reilly will never have to sit in a chair or lie on a trolley waiting to see a Doctor, if he has to go to Hospital himself, he’ll just use the old saying, do you know who I am and get ushered straight in.
Why can’t they start with the “Fat cats” at the top of the HSE, start from the top and work their way down – with so many front line staff going how do we need so many people at the top? but I don’t really see this happening as these “fat cat’s” look after their own and its the front end staff who do MOST of the work in the HSE who have to leave – daft, can’t see these “fat cats” moving off their chairs to help with the front line staff who are left to pick up the pieces.
Croke Farce in place with who knows how many squads of public servants sitting on their hands. A retirement scheme that didn’t discriminate between critical skills of a surgeon and those of a photocopy operator. This nonsense is so far fetched it would hardly make it into fiction.
Minister for Death (oops health) James Reilly just go and take a running jump out of Dail Eireann and never been see again and I promise I will not put out an alert of a missing person for you Get lost you are as incompetent and useless as an umbrella in a hurricane
Bloody hell another sacrifice for their pleasure. FG are meant to be conservatives so I’ll let one of the founders of the ideology who was an Irish man speak:
“it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion” – Edmund Burke , 19th April 1774
Dr James o Reilly should be put to shame, this government promised during the election, that the health service was one of their priorities and education and free medical for everyone if they got in, on national tv show, I have a copy of that, must put it up on Utube, but they never kept any of those promise, all a pack of lies during campaign election, this man claims he is a doctor, more like doctor Quack, o Reilly is a tension seeker and likes to be heard through the media and his photo shoots, if he can only see and hear himself, he sound childish and ridiculous and he hasn’t got a clue how to rum a medical degree, never mind run as Minister for health, all are great surgeon and doctors were either force to sign or immigrate to another country for a better future away from this idiot of a hoot! Rita Cahill
This is scary. He can’t put a foot right this man.
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