Almost 2,000 working or ‘job ready’ through Ireland’s call recruitment drive

Almost 2,000 people hired through the Government “Be on Call for Ireland” recruitment drive to deal with the coronavirus pandemic are working or ready to work for the health service.

The HSE released figures on Saturday showing that just 57 of these recruits have begun working, 553 are “job ready” and 500 are “available to the services as and when they need them.”

Some 880 student nurses who applied through the call-out were progressed through a separate stream and are working as health care assistants in community and acute hospitals, the HSE said.

This combined total of 1,990 to come through the “Be on Call for Ireland” drive amounts to less than three per cent of the 73,000 people to apply to help the health service through this crisis.

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Some 1,630 candidates have been “successful at interview,” said a HSE spokeswoman.

The spokeswoman for the HSE said that “the vast majority of applications for the initiative were not health care professionals.”

There were 24,000 expressions of interest received within 24 hours of the recruitment call being made to reinforce frontline medical staff when it was announced on St Patrick’s Day.

The request to bolster staffing levels within the health service was made to anyone who had retired within the last five years as well as part-time workers and students.

The HSE has hired the recruitment company CPL, which provides subcontractors to Facebook and other large employers, to support the "Be on Call for Ireland" recruitment drive.

CPL has been recruited to contract the workers “due to the strain on existing HSE resources to meet the Covid-19 challenge,” the HSE spokeswoman said in a statement.

The publicly funded health service declined to disclose what it was paying the private company, saying that the rate of pay “for its services for this project is commercially sensitive.”

Three-month contracts of employment through the recruitment drive will be with CPL, and not the HSE, but the HSE stressed that the contractors will be paid the same as HSE employees.

The contract includes “a paid sick entitlement for employment-acquired Covid-19 illness,” the HSE said, and that the contracts “may be extended as per the needs of the healthcare service and the wishes of the candidate.”

“Employment contracts may be reviewed at a later date, once we understand the impact this is having on the healthcare system,” said the spokeswoman.

The health service has said that it only plans to use the Be on Call for Ireland contractors "when all other resourcing streams are exhausted."

More than 1,000 people have been recruited to the health service separately by HBS Recruit, the HSE’s national recruitment service, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The purpose of the Be on Call for Ireland initiative is to create reserve pools of ‘job ready’ new healthcare professionals for the services to use as and when they are needed in response to Covid-19 and healthcare management,” said the HSE in reply to questions from The Irish Times.

“The Covid-19 crisis is ongoing. However, to date, the staffing needs have been largely met through other recruitment channels. There continues to be a ‘job ready’ pool available through the ‘Be on Call of Ireland’ initiative.”

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett raised the short-term nature and other aspects of the contracts during Dáil questioning with the Taoiseach this week, asking him why the new workers had been “given the worst possible contracts.”

The HSE said last weekend that about 4,500 HSE staff were out of work, either on sick leave in self-isolation with the coronavirus disease, with suspected Covid-19 symptoms or for other reasons such as childcare difficulties.