Government is recklessly endangering patients and health staff with new recruitment restriction measures – Marie Sherlock TD
Government is recklessly endangering patients and health staff with new recruitment restriction measures - Marie Sherlock TD - The Labour Party
Labour Health spokesperson Marie Sherlock TD has said the Minister for Health and Minister for Public Expenditure have now “lost the run of themselves” in their desperate and reckless bid to contain the HSE deficit.
Deputy Sherlock said:
“There are serious questions to be asked about the competence of those making these reckless decisions about how our health service is run.
“The decision to force all recruitment decisions through the Department of Health tears apart the notion that the HSE runs the health service. But more crucially, it divorces the link between patient safety and clinical decision making about safe staffing with the appropriate local and regional HSE managers who are tasked with running the health service. This is both reckless and downright dangerous at a time where hospitals are already relying to an alarming extent on surge capacity and dealing with very high increases in demand.
“Furthermore, the response by the Department to the deficit is also dishonest. Internal HSE documents seen by me show that the HSE’s non pay deficit is running at almost 3 times (2.9) the pay deficit, yet it seems that safe staffing levels are being made the sacrificial lamb all in the name of driving down a deficit. It is important to say that a HSE budget deficit was always certain given the amateurish, arbitrary and upside down way the Department of Health sets health budgets by setting the figure first and then leaving to the HSE to fit it to unknown rises in demand.
“The decision revealed in the Irish Times today is the latest in a series of desperate bids by the Department of Health to rein in a deficit.
“It follows the insane decision in June to force all clinical and non clinical invoices worth €10,000 or more across every acute hospital to be sent up for by the CEO of the HSE. This impacted the timing of orders for vital cancer and other living safe drugs, which run to hundreds of thousands of euros every single day across acute hospitals and it finally had to be withdrawn because the dikatat was unworkable.
“Then in July the Department of Health imposed rules that all non clinical invoices worth €5000 or more would have to be sent for approval to the CEO of the HSE. This includes the bills for the toilet paper, the milk, the vegetables, the taxis for dialysis patients and all the other everyday expenses that hospitals have to incur.
“Patients and staff deserve better than this rollercoaster of cutbacks in the health service.”