@Simon Peters: it’s all the doctor’s fault?
Some wonderful insights on this forum

@Simon Peters: A friend of mine works as a nurse in a supervisory capacity in a unit in the country It was a hospital but now is a glorified nursing home. She is told weekly that she cannot hire any agency staff or give any overtime so as a result she finds herself doing normal nursing duties because she just couldn’t watch while someone has to sit in their own pooh all day. As a result she has to go in on her day off to do the paperwork because the volume of it is overwhelming There are 20 beds in this unit but there are 14 staff in administration 6 of which cant wont and refuse to use computers. Imagine in 2018 someone in a clerical position who wont use a computer!!!!!! Coincidently these are the people on the highest salaries one and a half times what the nurses are on. This girls cousin is an accountant and was seconded to a large Dublin public hospital because their financial controller was incompetent Her company was paid €330 per hour for her time there. On top of that the salaries paid to none core staff were amazing Most of the porters were getting over 80 grand a year when their overtime was factored in. There is money everywhere in the Hse except to pay people who might make you better

@EFitz66: 100 percent agree I have been saying this for years, the unions have the whole system destroyed, there are 5 admin staff in Ireland for 2 in th Uk for each patient. Until we get a government who will take on the unions and take the pain for a while nothing will ever change. People need to be made aware what the issues really are in our hospitals, the media should be highlighting this constintaly but you don’t hear the facts much from our corrupt media lets face it.

@Peter Hughes: Absolutely and the 2 admin staff in the Uk system are not the most productive I can tell you. Two hospitals in Dublin have the exact same diagnostic machine in their labs 3 staff in the private hospital do 4 times more tests that 5 staff in the public hospital and no one gives a toss

@Simon Peters: if it weren’t for the unions, I’d be working for €10 an hour in a pathology lab doing 70 hours a week. Cop on.

@Simon Peters: probably sums up the country as a whole

This situation will not be resolved with FG in government, it won’t even be tackled, they don’t have the backbone to call out all the chiefs doing SFA In the HSE.

If the HSE were to be inspected by their own HIQA standards they’d be shut down immediately.

@Simon Peters: The unions? You lunatic. This is systemic top-tier planning inability for decades! This ‘new plan’ is like giving a cancer victim some panadol (very expensive, heavily levied panadol). We (as a nation of people) are simply not ready to run our own shop yet.

@Ciara Ni Mhurchu: Actually you wouldn’t You would work 48 hours a week and that was not brought about by the unions. That was an Eu directive and the government were allowed to make junior doctors exempt at the time There are too many people far too many people in the Hse doing nothing On top of that there are loads of ways technology could do menial tasks like form filling etc, Labour is the Hse’s biggest expense so they need to reduce the labour cost in every area it can and use the savings to increase the pay of key staff so they will not go abroad for more money and attract more professionals to come here to work in our health service. As a country we are spending enough on health but the wrong people are getting the money Simple as that

@Mark McDermott: The consultants are incentivized to keep the public waiting lists long as it means that there is more call for their private work.

@Mark McDermott: Dont worry Mark , they cannot attract any consultants to work in the public system with all the so called perks of the job- ever wonder why that is?

@Mark McDermott: Try change working conditions for Doctors/Consultants/Nurses and you will have a strike on your hands. In reality the unions hold the power here, not the Government.

@Do the Bort man: The “unions” don’t make policy, don’t run hospitals. The “unions” are the scapegoat for the deliberate destruction of the public health service by a neoliberal FFG government.

@Dave Doyle: I never suggested that unions make policy or run hospitals. However, any changes to policy relating to working conditions for staff must get sign off by the unions. The idea that a government would deliberately destroy a public health system, like you suggest, is laughable.

@Do the Bort man: They are deliberately destroying the health service though, through their own ineptitude . Do they care? It appears not.

@mary conneely: The problem is we have way too many small, understaffed hospitals. We need to consolidate our hospitals into a fewer larger better resourced ones. That’s the way it is in the UK and the rest of Europe. Local resistance and parish pump politics won’t allow that to happen.

@Dave Doyle: I would normaly agree with you on a lot of things, but the Unions do have a large piece to play here. Whenever any reforms are tried or better work practices put in place and people dont like it they go to their Union and then its stopped. I have worked in the past for the HSE and eveything we were tyryingt to do was impedded at every step.
For example a new process was being put in place ofr a task that would reduce the time required and people to do it by 50%, Unions stoppped it.

@Irish Bob: Ok, you worked there, you have first hand knowledge. I see a few of the FG fanboys blaming everything on the unions. If the unions were a real problem they would be gone, but they have their uses for political reasons. 15 Billion per year should be enough, were it going to where it was needed. Only a fraction does.

@Dave Doyle: I’m an FG fan boy? Maybe look at my profile image!

@Do the Bort man: If we were to move to a 7 day a week service or at least an extended service in the evenings/weekends, that would mean hiring a lot more doctors/technicians etc. They can’t fill the positions that already exist!