Staff at the Health Service Executive’s agency for monitoring infectious diseases have complained of stress and burnout due to an “unprecedented” number of requests for information from media and politicians during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The extra work may compromise the ability of the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) to track new virus variants or infectious outbreaks, they suggest.
The centre received 858 requests for external data in 2020 and 781 in 2021, according to an academic study carried out by HPSC staff members and published on its website. The vast majority were from journalists and concerned Covid.
The number of Freedom of Information (FoI) Act requests submitted to the agency rose from 10 in 2019 to 133 in 2020 and 219 in 2021. The study estimates each FoI request costs €244.76 to answer.
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Upwards of one-third of staff surveyed for the study said information requests were poorly formulated, already publicly available or inappropriate in tone; 33 per cent described the tone and content of requests as “accusatory, threatening, litigious or political”. Only 3 per cent deemed them appropriate.
Staff spent an average of 0.6 days a week addressing these requests, the study reports, but one-third said it took up at least a day a week.
Half of those surveyed said they had to generate repetitive or uninformative reports and 40 per cent cited missed deadlines, longer working hours or delayed publication of new reports.
Seventy per cent said the work had a negative impact on their wellbeing and 60 per cent said they were more stressed. “The staff surveyed identified an overall negative impact of addressing external information requests on both their workload and wellbeing,” according to the study.
Queries over the two years took up more than 300 days of staff time, the equivalent of two staff posts, at a direct cost of over €305,000, it estimates.
The volume of external data requests and queries in an emergency situation such as a pandemic has not been considered in preparedness plans, or resourced accordingly, the authors say.
Requests for information fell last year but remain “considerably higher” than pre-pandemic.
Demand for information during the pandemic exceeded expectations, even though health bodies have been working toward combating a health “infodemic”. “What HSE-HPSC experienced, however, was not anticipating nor having the capacity to satisfy the public appetite for data during the pandemic, and recourse to HPSC to dispel or clarify issues arising from the Covid infodemic in Ireland.
“Time spent by HPSC staff on external information requests may compromise the provision and development of up-to-date reports in a timely manner to enable the most appropriate response to emerging public health scenarios, such as emergence of novel variants of concern or outbreaks of other infectious disease.
“The associated indirect costs of missed deadlines, delayed outputs and time lost out on research projects will likely have a long-term impact on the quality and completeness of HSE-HPSC surveillance and reporting of infectious disease epidemiology in Ireland.”
It says measures for controlling “surges” of external information requests are required “to protect staff workload and wellbeing, and assure sustainable pandemic response and preparedness”.
In future, the most “pertinent” information requests should be readily prioritised for response, and those less pertinent directed elsewhere.
Thirty of the HPSC’s 80 staff responded to the survey.
