'Significent changes' in Public sector moratorium? Beverly Flynn

QuiteInterestin

"Dep Flynn said that a moratorium on recruitment is no longer viable and the Fianna Fáil TD said that after speaking with a HSE senior official in HR on a national level she was informed that “significant changes” are to be announced next week in relation to the moratorium on recruitment in the HSE"

Found this on the Mayo Advertiser website at http://www.advertiser.ie/mayo/article/22471

Was posted on the 19th of Feb and nothings been announced since. Does anyone know how much truth is in it and what will these changes be?

gandalf

The only thing it should be is redeployment of staff to cover short comings. The cannot possible be considering hiring more people at this stage if they are then we might as well call in the IMF.

ardmacha

Re-deployment is very desirable, but if you don't have a heart surgeon, professor of Chemistry etc you cannot just take an underworked clerk and redeploy them to those roles.

Godge

ardmacha wrote: »

Re-deployment is very desirable, but if you don't have a heart surgeon, professor of Chemistry etc you cannot just take an underworked clerk and redeploy them to those roles.

This is the big conundrum.

We have too many nurses by European standards. Less nurses but more care staff are needed to push down costs.

The new consultant contract was designed to get more doctors but that means less of other types of health staff.

In third-level education there are too many specialists with nobody left to teach. How many teachers of apprentice bricklayers, plumbers and electricians in the system are there with little or no work.

It is easy to redeploy clerical officers and even managers but some sort of targeted redundancy plan is needed for specialists.

gandalf

ardmacha wrote: »

Re-deployment is very desirable, but if you don't have a heart surgeon, professor of Chemistry etc you cannot just take an underworked clerk and redeploy them to those roles.

I never suggested otherwise. I suspect Dep Flynn is just spouting to get her name in the papers tbh.

imme

Godge wrote: »

This is the big conundrum.

We have too many nurses by European standards. Less nurses but more care staff are needed to push down costs.

The new consultant contract was designed to get more doctors but that means less of other types of health staff.

In third-level education there are too many specialists with nobody left to teach. How many teachers of apprentice bricklayers, plumbers and electricians in the system are there with little or no work.

It is easy to redeploy clerical officers and even managers but some sort of targeted redundancy plan is needed for specialists.

What are these European standards you speak of good sir/madam, by which we have too many nurses?
Could we not have cleaners instead of nurses or 'care staff?' to look after patients so that we could push down costs even further.:rolleyes:

The_Honeybadger

imme wrote: »

What are these European standards you speak of good sir/madam, by which we have too many nurses?
Could we not have cleaners instead of nurses or 'care staff?' to look after patients so that we could push down costs even further.:rolleyes:

www.eahp.eu/content/download/25141/163961/.../Management31-34.pdf

Here is an interesting read on european healthcare. There are some good graphs in this pdf that illustrate that we have more nurses and indeed total healthcare staff per head of population than anywhere in europe. We have fewer doctors however than most countries. On this evidence numbers employed in healthcare should not be a problem, so it may just be down to bad management that our healthcare service is so poor.

Nody

mickeyk wrote: »

...it may just be down to bad management that our healthcare service is so poor.

Bad management in HSE? Clearly you jest dear sir; HSE is the shining star of management in the republic!

Sleepy

If they can bring in new nurses in permanent or contract roles cheaper than the current agency rates I'd be all for it.

The union should be made give ground in areas of demarcation / job flexibility before any extra staff are hired though.

Fat_Fingers

I would not pay attention to anything that comes out of class act - Beverly Flynn. She is embodiment of everything that is wrong with Fianna Fáil and our political system.

deise blue

Nody wrote: »

Bad management in HSE? Clearly you jest dear sir; HSE is the shining star of management in the republic!

Surely not , that accolade is due to the Management boards of the Irish Banks ?

gandalf

Sleepy wrote: »

If they can bring in new nurses in permanent or contract roles cheaper than the current agency rates I'd be all for it.

The union should be made give ground in areas of demarcation / job flexibility before any extra staff are hired though.

Actually I would leave the frontline staff alone in the HSE until the layers of unnecessary management are dealt with.

Say what you want about nurses/doctors/paramedics but they do a hell of a job without the backup they deserve from the administration side of things in there (I have dealt with HSE on the management side in business so unfortunately I know what they are like!).

rightwingdub

What, increase the number of staff employed in an already overbloated HSE, I've never heard such madness in all my life, the government need to cut the number of staff in the HSE by at least 20,000 not be looking to increase staff numbers, I sincerely hope Beverley Flynn is talking rubbish.

deise blue

rightwingdub wrote: »

What, increase the number of staff employed in an already overbloated HSE, I've never heard such madness in all my life, the government need to cut the number of staff in the HSE by at least 20,000 not be looking to increase staff numbers, I sincerely hope Beverley Flynn is talking rubbish.

Have you some facts to back up your assertion that the HSE is overstaffed by at least 20,000 ?
Or is this a figure you have simply plucked from the ether ?
How do you propose reducing staff numbers by at least 20,000 - by voluntary redundancy or by simply adding people to the unemployment figures ?

rightwingdub

deise blue wrote: »

Have you some facts to back up your assertion that the HSE is overstaffed by at least 20,000 ?
Or is this a figure you have simply plucked from the ether ?
How do you propose reducing staff numbers by at least 20,000 - by voluntary redundancy or by simply adding people to the unemployment figures ?

Get rid of 5,000 nurses the HSE IS overstaffed with nurses, 10,000 in admin and 5,000 at management level.

P. Breathnach

Stopping all recruitment and promotion should be seen as an emergency measure, and a fair case can be made for taking such an emergency measure, given the state of the public finances.

But the thing about such measures is that they are crude. One unit of the public service, providing essential services, might lose half of its front-line staff, while another unit, providing a non-essential service, might lose nobody.

As soon as you invoke an emergency measure, you should start a process of modifying its impact so as to maintain all essential services while scaling down or eliminating other activities. Of course you cannot re-deploy a generalist to fill a specialist role and, in most cases, you cannot re-deploy a specialist to fill a generalist role. Nor can you willy-nilly relocate people from one end of the country to the other just because there is a staff shortage somewhere. But, even allowing for practical limitations, a good deal of reorganisation and reorientation is possible, and should be undertaken as a high priority.

There is a case for scaling down the public service, although I think not by much. That scaling-down should be managed strategically rather than by the crude tactic of recruitment and promotion embargos.

I suspect that Beverly is operating in populist mode rather than engaging in strategic planning.

deise blue

rightwingdub wrote: »

Get rid of 5,000 nurses the HSE IS overstaffed with nurses, 10,000 in admin and 5,000 at management level.

As I thought - nothing to back up your assertion that the HSE is overstaffed by at least 20,000.
Just a factually and statistically unsupported personal view.
No response either to my query as how best to achieve these job cuts.

changes

rightwingdub wrote: »

Get rid of 5,000 nurses the HSE IS overstaffed with nurses, 10,000 in admin and 5,000 at management level.

rightwingdub,

If you got rid of 5000 staff at management level how many would that leave then?

RGS

Here is an interesting read on european healthcare. There are some good graphs in this pdf that illustrate that we have more nurses and indeed total healthcare staff per head of population than anywhere in europe. We have fewer doctors however than most countries. On this evidence numbers employed in healthcare should not be a problem, so it may just be down to bad management that our healthcare service is so poor.

We have fewer doctors than other countries therefore we employ more nurses to do the job of tending to our sick relatives and friends.

Are you seriously suggesting we employ the same number of doctors and nurses as other countries when doctor salaries are multiples of nurses salaries?

Arnold Layne

deadtiger wrote: »

Actually I would leave the frontline staff alone in the HSE until the layers of unnecessary management are dealt with.

Say what you want about nurses/doctors/paramedics but they do a hell of a job without the backup they deserve from the administration side of things in there (I have dealt with HSE on the management side in business so unfortunately I know what they are like!).

I have to agree. When the unions are protesting they roll out the frontline staff as those taking the cuts. There are a lot more employed in administration in the HSE that do SFA.

I would have no problem with health sector spending if there were more nurses and doctors in the frontline tending to patients' needs than the admin staff who decide when it is viable to open wards at a stroke of a pen.

The_Honeybadger

RGS wrote: »

We have fewer doctors than other countries therefore we employ more nurses to do the job of tending to our sick relatives and friends.

Are you seriously suggesting we employ the same number of doctors and nurses as other countries when doctor salaries are multiples of nurses salaries?

Wasn't suggesting anything i was merely stating the situation. Perhaps we should look to countries with top class health services and try to emulate them or at least copy some of the things they do. Maybe we do need more doctors and less nurses, other countries have a different balance between the two and it works for them. As I stated we have more people per head of population working in healthcare than anywhere in Europe and yet we have a shambolic service. Are you seriously suggesting the current service is perfect and we should leave it as is?