Problems for HSE if unions don't agree to redeployment

VOLUNTARY REDUNDANCIES in the health service will present a huge challenge to the Health Service Executive (HSE) if there is no agreement on redeployment of staff, the organisation’s chief executive said yesterday.

Prof Brendan Drumm told the Dáil Committee on Public Accounts the health system could end up with “all the people in the wrong places” if agreement is not reached.

As part of April’s budget, the Government announced early retirement packages for public servants over 50. Prof Drumm said they expected to drop 2,000 people from the HSE under the scheme. “We may be challenged by the numbers coming forward,” he said.

The committee was told redeployment issues were ongoing and the HSE was in negotiation with unions, but no official agreement had been reached to allow it move staff. “This is a huge challenge for us,” Prof Drumm said.

They needed to be able to redeploy staff without there being “a massive industrial relations issue at every turn in the road” to accommodate changes including the plan for primary care centres.

The centres, comprising teams of GPs and other healthcare staff, were to be introduced as part of the primary care strategy.

Laverne McGuinness, national director of primary, community and continuing care at the HSE, said that by the end of 2009 there would be nine primary care centres with 12 teams. And by 2011, there would be 530 primary care teams nationwide, in 200 centres.

They would use existing staff in the teams, Ms McGuinness said, because of the moratorium on recruitment in the public service. But, she said, some grades were exempt, including social workers and therapists and these posts would be filled.

Labour TD Róisín Shortall said the primary care centre programme was behind schedule and that 400 teams were supposed to have been deployed by 2009. “By any standards, that was a poor performance and it is the public who are paying the price,” she said.

Prof Drumm said the HSE could have moved rapidly to produce the teams but had decided it was better to take time and produce more robust teams.

“It was a judgment call we made to row back from 400,” he said.

Secretary general of the Department of Health, Michael Scanlan, said they had promised 400 centres “in development” by 2009.

Darragh O’Brien TD wondered if next year the HSE would say they could not introduce some services because of the early retirement programme. He also asked about the use of consultants.

Prof Drumm said the HSE paid €15 million for consultants’ reports in 2008, whose purpose was to validate proposed changes.

“In the real world where we face resistance to change . . . it can be very hard to get that change without validation,” he said.

Prof Drumm defended the level of administrative staff in the HSE. He said reports that 49 per cent of the 111,000 staff were management or administrative were wrong. Some 73 per cent were frontline staff and a further 17,000 were consultants’ secretaries, dealing with patients. “There are only 4,000 or 5,000 backroom people,” he said.