Healthcare workers are still unsure how patients will be affected by a hiring freeze or which jobs it covers, their trade union F\u00f3rsa has warned.<\/p>\n
HSE regions were told last month to curb spending as the HSE budget deficit hit \u20ac250m by March.<\/p>\n
HSE South West and HSE Dublin & South East are among three regions facing tighter restrictions including on hiring \u201cnon-frontline non-critical\u201d workers and use of agency staff.<\/p>\n
Head of the F\u00f3rsa Health & Welfare division Ashley Connolly said: \u201cWe raised concerns that this will increase agency spend and force further out-sourcing moving forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n Every year we are seeing an increase in agency spend. We are now up to an average of \u20ac80m a month on agency. It\u2019s over \u20ac900m spent on agency last year.\n <\/p>\n
This is driven by staff shortages, she told the Irish Examiner during the F\u00f3rsa annual conference in Killarney on Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Unions have asked which jobs are covered by freeze but do not yet know, she added.<\/p>\n
Clerical roles still interact with the public, Ms Connolly said, including \u201cthe number of people in any hospital who are used to check in patients, take phone calls, to return phone calls of an anxious person”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She said of the pause: \u201cI just think it\u2019s scapegoating, it\u2019s something that is used to present like \u2018we\u2019re tackling this\u2019 but there needs to be better understanding of the core roles.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ms Connolly called for budget changes, adding: \u201c The budgets have to move into multi-annual. I don\u2019t think you can run the health services on an annual budget with a stop and a start.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The impact of the 2023 hiring freeze is still felt, she said, adding: \u201cHow are you supposed to expand services in this cycle of up and down?\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Healthcare workers are still unsure how patients will be affected by a hiring freeze or which jobs it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":451988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[103,397,4892,396,2120,61,60],"class_list":["post-451987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-health-news","tag-healthcare","tag-hse","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/451988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}