Employment: Health boards are still recruiting candidates to fill senior management posts in a permanent capacity despite the fact the positions are to be abolished within weeks. Eithne Donnellan, Health Correspondent, reports.
Examples of posts in the process of being filled are the positions of general manager of acute hospital services and general manager of community services with the Midland Health Board.
The revelation that the posts are being filled six weeks before health boards are to be scrapped is "very concerning", according to the Labour Party's health spokeswoman, Liz McManus.
There were, she said, management posts also being filled in the new Health Service Executive, which will take over the day-to-day running of the health service from January 1st when the health boards will be a thing of the past.
"I think it's a bit of a mess. Positions are being filled willy nilly. It's going to end up with more administrative posts filled than we would have had in the old system and at the same time there is a promise of no-forced redundancies," she said.
"If health boards will have no role in running acute services from January, why is such a job as general manager of acute hospital services being filled? It makes no sense," she added.
The Midland Health Board said it received authorisation from the Department of Health to proceed with the filling of the two posts.
"These are pivotal operational posts which involve key responsibilities in relation to the co-ordination and management of services across three acute hospital sites and in a community care area," a spokeswoman for the board said.
A Department of Health spokesman said a directive it issued last March made it clear senior management posts in the health service could not be filled without Department approval. Certain posts, such as those in the Midland Health Board region, had been approved for filling, he said, because they were likely to continue to be necessary under the new structures.
"It was considered both were posts that would not be significantly changed by the structural reforms," he said.
The posts were already filled in an acting capacity, he added.
The aim of the new Health Service Executive (HSE) is to provide a more streamlined health service with less bureaucracy. The executive chairman of the interim HSE, Kevin Kelly, said yesterday people currently working with the health boards would retain their current salaries, even if they were moved to roles with less responsibility under the reforms.
Ms McManus said: "We now appear to be getting parallel bureaucracies in the health service, with no improvement in the services available to patients."
Fine Gael health spokesman, Dr Liam Twomey, said it seemed the embargo on recruitment in the health service only seemed to be enforced when it came to employing extra front-line staff, such as nurses. "I hope its not a situation where people are sorting themselves out before the health boards are abolished," Dr Twomey said.