Taoiseach says key vacancies will be filled

TARGETED INVESTMENT and recruitment will be undertaken for key vacancies in the health service in the wake of the retirement of almost 4,000 people, the Dáil has heard.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said €23.4 million had been made available for the clinical programme with €20 million put into the primary care area to allow for the replacement of key frontline staff.

In mental health €35 million had been made available for the recruitment of an additional 414 whole-time job equivalents and €5 million had been allocated in the mental health and disability areas for “innovative practices and service modernisation”.

Mr Kenny was responding to Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams who highlighted the departure of 3,800 staff from the health services, including 1,000 nurses and more than 80 doctors and dentists. Mr Adams said the Government had given almost €20 billion to the banks and should “change tack” and hire nurses and doctors to replace those about to retire.

Mr Kenny insisted it was not a case of every person leaving the public service not being replaced. The Minister for Health had made it clear “there will be targeted investment and recruitment and some key vacancies will be filled”.

The Taoiseach said what they were doing was “effectively managing the movement out of the public service, which happens every year to the tune of several thousand and which has been signalled for quite a long time”.

In recent years commentators had repeatedly talked about the “bloated extent of the public service” but when a system “is put in place to reduce that overall number and cost, we get a different reaction”.

Mr Adams criticised his remarks saying that “listening to what the Taoiseach has just said you’d think there was no crisis”. He said the loss of all those senior staff, the embargo, closure of hospital beds and continuing gaps in emergency departments “are creating a perfect storm in our health services”.

The Taoiseach had said on RTÉ radio on Sunday that transition teams were in place but on Tuesday told the Dáil they were not in place. The reality “is that there is no dynamic plan to manage that and this is bedded in the Taoiseach’s austerity policy”.

Mr Kenny, however, accused the Louth TD of being “afraid that the effective management of this transition period will work”.

Referring to the retirement of 500 people in psychiatric services, Mr Kenny said “a different kind of worker, carer and professional is needed now”.

Not all of them would be replaced but under the €35 million ringfenced for psychiatric services the equivalent of 414 full-time people would be recruited, “although many of them not in the traditional sense of the psychiatric nurse”.

He said the Department of Health and the HSE had been doing a great deal of intensive work. It was now clear the categories and numbers of people who would leave the health service.

The assistant secretary in the department was “in charge of the line management of this nationally with the HSE, the regional directors and at the bottom of that scale, the planners in each individual hospital”, Mr Kenny said.