The HSE is seeking to appoint up to 15 senior management personnel in the new integrated healthcare areas to be established under its new structural reform plans.
The new integrated healthcare area manager positions will be at the grade of national director, the salary for which starts at about €170,000.
The HSE has said the Government has insisted the restructuring of the health service must take place “on a whole-time equivalent and grade neutral basis”.
It said there would be no voluntary redundancy scheme put in place as part of a restructuring that will see the health service in future operate in six separate regions.
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The integrated healthcare areas will essentially be substructures within each region. There will be 20 integrated healthcare areas in total and each are envisaged to serve a population of between 150,000 and 450,000 people.
The former administrative divisions between the parts of the HSE that oversaw the delivery of hospital and community services will be broken down under the new reforms. The integrated healthcare areas will bring together acute and community services as well as others provided by bodies and organisations outside the HSE.
The HSE has advertised for applications to form five separate panels for the post of manager in the integrated healthcare area (IHA) in five of its six new regions. The HSE midwest region is not included in the advertisement.
The posts are open to applicants within the health service and from outside.
The advertisement says that “there are currently 15 permanent integrated healthcare area manager vacancies available”. It says five separate panels may be formed, which will be used to fill current and future, permanent and specified purpose vacancies.
The new integrated healthcare area manager would report to the recently-appointed regional executive officer who in turn report to the overall HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster.
The HSE said that Mr Gloster had always maintained “that this is a reorganisation of the existing structure of the HSE to a more effective structure integrating hospital and community services regionally to allow for the better delivery of services to patients”.
“The Government has stipulated that the restructuring is to be completed on a whole time equivalent (WTE) and grade-neutral basis and there will be no voluntary redundancy scheme. While there may be a very small number of highly specialised posts recruited externally, this will be done in the context of an overall WTE-neutral position”.
The advertisement says that the integrated healthcare area manager will be “a core member of the health region executive management team (EMT), and as such will have key working relationships with all of the other members of that EMT, the function of which, is to support and enable the integrated healthcare area managers in planning and delivering services to patients and service users”.
“Members of the health region EMT include planning and performance functions, public health functions, clinical leadership functions, HR, finance, estates and IT functions. The integrated healthcare area manager will also work closely with the change and innovation hub at health region level to ensure that a programmatic and developmental approach to delivering change is progressed and embedded across the region.”
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