Nursing board failed to follow hiring guidelines, says report

The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland failed to comply with Department of Finance guidelines and public sector policy on the employment of non-permanent staff, according to a report by consultants.

Procurement processes were not followed, there was a lack of documented rationale for appointments and the set of contracts was incomplete, the report prepared by BDO for the board says.

The consultants said a number of steps designed to help ensure transparency in appointments were missing in some of the cases they reviewed. In one case, an increase in salary was awarded “without a clear and documented justification”.

A number of board employees have been on fixed-term contracts for more than four years and so must be deemed to have a contract of indefinite duration, they noted.

Points queried

Some of the points made in the report were queried by the then chief executive,

Maura Pidgeon

. The report notes her responses “did not fully agree with our findings”.

It reviewed the engagement by the board of eight consultants and found the correct procurement procedure as required by the level of expenditure involved was not followed.

Public tendering is required where spending exceeds €25,000. The biggest contract was for €120,822 “for services not envisaged in original request for tender”.

In addition, procurement processes were not followed in the case of seven of 11 external suppliers reviewed.

The decision to recruit “subject matter experts” was taken at senior management level and there were no business cases documented to explain the rationale behind the decision, the report said.

Responding, Ms Pidgeon said filling short-term needs in the organisation would become cumbersome if competitive tendering was required each time.

She was not aware of any precedent for a requirement for formal business cases where experts were being recruited.

No interview notes

For four out of seven contract staff reviewed, no interview notes were available, according to the report. Two of the interviews were conducted by just one person.

Ms Pidgeon said interview notes were retained for one year and then discarded.

The board had long-term shortcomings that she had tried to address. “This does not excuse the shortcomings but it explains them, puts them in some context and removes the somewhat ‘sinister’ implications of recent wrongdoing that seems to run through your draft.”

Ms Pidgeon described the issue of contracts of infinite duration as “a legacy issue” and said they were issued throughout the public service to overcome the recruitment embargo.

“The implication is that NMBI are some sort of serial and serious offender and in some way unique in this regard. That is very concerning for me as CEO.”