Administration: There will be a significant reduction in the numbers of "backroom administrative people" employed in the Health Service Executive (HSE) over the next few years, the head of the organisation, Prof Brendan Drumm, said yesterday.
He said there were 3,500 such administrators in the HSE at present and as more reforms took place and more services such as human resources and finance were shared across the former health board regions, he believed some of these people would be surplus to requirements.
"Among our 3,500 backroom administrative people we do need certainly over the next number of years as we bring in shared services, we should be able to see a significant reduction in that number of people," he said.
Changes being brought about by the HSE would at a minimum take five years and he suspected even longer.
"Of the 70,000 people that we have, there are 3,500 people in back-office functions. The other administrative categories that bring you up to 16,000 or 17,000 people are your secretaries in your clinics, your X-ray person typing your report, they are absolutely front-line people and yet we get hammered over the issue," he said.
Prof Drumm's comments came following criticism that the number of administrators in the health service on large salaries was increasing since the advent of the HSE.
Figures released to Fine Gael, in response to a parliamentary question, show the number of health managers earning more than €75,000 has almost doubled in the past year, rising from 330 in January 2005 to 632 in January 2006.
Under a deal reached with the Impact trade union when the HSE was being established, former health board managers who were not appointed to senior positions in the new system retained their existing conditions while new managers received the higher pay scales as well.
Prof Drumm said this deal was reached with Government before he took up his post last August. But he said the main reason more people in the HSE were earning over €75,000 was due to national pay rounds. These were people who got a national pay award the same as everybody else in the country and it brought them above €75,000, he said.
"It was portrayed as if I suddenly had doubled the numbers of people in the organisation.There's been no increase in numbers of people in the organisation and these people got the same pay award as everybody else in the country got. Now to portray that as a doubling of the number of people in the organisation on a pay award is disingenuous. I mean we have to pay the national awards," he said.
He also defended his recent receipt of a €32,000 bonus after just 10 months in his job. He said he was amazed at the reaction to it because the details of his contract had been in the public domain since he took up his post.
He said if his income was benchmarked against the job he left as a hospital consultant, people would find his "isn't exactly such an attractive situation" in terms of pay. "I didn't rush into this job for money," he stressed.
Furthermore he said he wouldn't automatically get a bonus every year. Whether he got it was judged against very strict criteria.
"I'm paid €320,000 and I'm paid on top of that the potential of a 25 per cent bonus . . . it was there for my predecessor," he said.
"The bonus is based on a review that will occur probably every six months I suspect," he added.