Govt to Reduce HSE Managers

HSE wants 1,000 office jobs to go in €30m Scheme - Irish Times

Window dressing, soft soaping or real reform?

Has the HSE bedded down enough for this to happen? If so, then it has to be welcome.

Hopefully it will be welcomed by other workers in the Health Service, and that thay will see this as a move towards filling the posts that count the most rather than a threat to job security and union power.

from the above

Quote :

The external report found that while the number of clerical, administrative and managerial staff compared favourably with those in similar publicly-owned health service organisations in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, there were too many staff at senior levels.

It said the proportionate number of managers within the overall clerical, administrative and managerial ranks was "slightly higher" than in the National Health Service in the UK. But it also warned that there were "significant variations or anomalies" in the way management grades were deployed across the various regions.

The external consultants also said an initial review indicated there "has not been an effective and coherent multi-disciplinary national manpower planning system within the health service".

Pity it didn't give a link for that external report...

Quote :

200 senior managerial and 800 lower level clerical and administrative posts should go as part of a new voluntary early retirement scheme.

If the problem is at the managerial end I wonder why they are proposing to get rid of more clerical grade people?
If there is no one there to deal with admin, the services will deteriorate.

I think that the number of administrators needs to be reduced. If they can do it, without people goign on strike and causing other people stress, then thats great. We need more Doctors and Nurses, not more administrators.

I think that however unappealing the project may be that we have to try and get PPARs or an equivalent deployed across the Health Service. Staffing information should be more readily available to the HSE, i.e. we should not need to engage experts to investigate what is what. With that said, it was the right idea to get these guys in.

ceacg wrote:

I think that the number of administrators needs to be reduced. If they can do it, without people goign on strike and causing other people stress, then thats great. We need more Doctors and Nurses, not more administrators.

The last time I experienced a delay in seeing a doctor for something urgent, the cause of the delay was inadequate clerical staff, - it took an extra three or four weeks because consultants often only have part time secretaries. The system is not rational, as if they worked in teams sharing secretaries they could have full time cover. But the report quoted said our level of lower grade staffing was normal for Europe. It was the higher grades that were over staffed.

It sounds like the lower grade staff are not correctly distributed. If staff cannot be re-deployed then it may be necessary to ask them would they like to leave altogether.

The HSE are in favour of redundancy of clerical staff while the Dept is in favour of redeployment. Redeployment would probably be cheaper but it will only work if the people are able for the other jobs and willing to give it a shot.

There is no way it can be assessed on an employee by employee basis so the best global approach might be to accept the hit in order to avoid creating further problems by redeploying people to jobs they are not up to or interested in and which they resent having to do.

The danger of redundancy is many good people who have energy and drive will take the generous package and head for the private sector. The less capable, driven and confident might decide it is better to stay in the safe job. A clear out of capable people would be disastrous. Losing even two or three key personel at the one time can have devastating effects on an organisation.

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

It sounds like the lower grade staff are not correctly distributed. If staff cannot be re-deployed then it may be necessary to ask them would they like to leave altogether.

The HSE are in favour of redundancy of clerical staff while the Dept is in favour of redeployment. Redeployment would probably be cheaper but it will only work if the people are able for the other jobs and willing to give it a shot.

There is no way it can be assessed on an employee by employee basis so the best global approach might be to accept the hit in order to avoid creating further problems by redeploying people to jobs they are not up to or interested in and which they resent having to do.

The danger of redundancy is many good people who have energy and drive will take the generous package and head for the private sector. The less capable, driven and confident might decide it is better to stay in the safe job. A clear out of capable people would be disastrous. Losing even two or three key personel at the one time can have devastating effects on an organisation.

As the managers' age profile I believe is quite high the cheapest option would be not to replace people who retire and offering early retirement. When someone is going to get an ample pension, and is still capable of working, their redundancy payment should reflect that they would only be losing out on a couple of year's work.

I agree with Zhou that the brightest and most energetic go. Would it not make more sense to have a cull of poor performers rather than self-selection for redundancy?

I remain unconvinced about the clerical grades. They are general office workers by and large and easily transferable.

This is another reason why 'decentralisation' and separation of State Agencies is cracked - it makes it harder for people to transfer. There is no reason why a lower grade admin person from Health could not be transferred to Environment say, or a local authority position.

putting a freeze on recruiting or by retirement wastage is not he way to do it ,it needs to specific.

lostexpectation wrote:

putting a freeze on recruiting or by retirement wastage is not he way to do it ,it needs to specific.

Mm. Yes I think you're right in so far as possible lostexpectation. Its just that I don't think they are specialists - just general managers/administrators. Would you say keep the good ones, or what? or the ones who happen to be in posts that are actually necessary?

I wonder how they came up with the figure 200 and does it relate to actual roles/jobs that are not needed or is it just an abstract number.

A freeze on recruitment is never the way to solve a problem within any body - it is merely a pander in order to minimise confrontation with trade unions. That may sound like a very bourgeois statement but it is the truth. You can not solve endemic problems within a company by allowing it to tick on as is, hoping that it will solve itself by wastage dropping off at the other end. You need to do a comprehensive review of efficiency within the body and chop off the bits which are not necessary. It is most unfortunate for those who happen to be chopped, but it is frankly the only way to go about it.

You certainly shouldn't have a recruitment ban in place, which serves only to drive young and innovative graduates abroad in search of recruitment. That situation only further reinforces the problem into the future.

I wouldn't for a moment claim to be an expert as to where the inefficiencies in the HSE lie, nor do I have alot of time for the plethora of 'reports' by consultation quangos employed by the Government which supposedly aim to sort out the problem. I do however know from experience (Mother a Doctor, Girlfriend a trainee Speech and Language Therapist) that the whole health service is top heavy and in need of drastic restructuring - but we all knew that. Coincidentally, I don't think that wholescale privatisation is the answer either.

i know this isn't the same as medical staff recruitment freeze but, even the unions are giving out about that blocking recruitment in vital posts. no good for the she not good for unions. its up to the hse to have the right staff in the right place, and not play dangerous games.

Having the right staff in place applies to the whole of the organisation though, not merely the medical staff. Having an organisation full of people sharpening their pencils, unsure of what they are doing, causes such a body to become an inefficient bureaucracy and also to suffer capital haemorrhage. Which is precisely what the HSE is doing.

johnfás wrote:

Having the right staff in place applies to the whole of the organisation though, not merely the medical staff. Having an organisation full of people sharpening their pencils, unsure of what they are doing, causes such a body to become an inefficient bureaucracy and also to suffer haemorrhage, which is precisely what the HSE is doing.

Management of hospital resources is seriously dodgy. The whole idea of tweaking the budget by regularly shutting wards
(minimal savings as staff still paid and building/maintenance costs not reduced) is ludicrous, but has been going on for years.
Does the HSE even have multi-annual budgets? The whole thing is at the level of a bad farce.

I think there is a general simplistic difficulty when you have

a) A doctor with no business experience as Chief Executive of the HSE.
b) Businessmen with little medical experience making key decisions on medical services in hospitals.


Nothing against those concerned, but that is an acute difficulty.

It is then not helped by the fact that you have doctors resenting and not cooperating with hospital managers because they think they are idiots. As anyone who watched the Gerry Robinson programme regarding the NHS on the BBC will have noted.

I don't think one could operate a selective cull to weed out the duds. I have for a couple of reasons:

1. It is impossible to identify the duds given the problems that exist at management level. Any process to identify themselves would have no guarantee of success. The internal civil service rules as to how staff performance may also cuse problems - lots of assessments and lots of rights not to be criticised.

2. It would probably be illegal to differentiate between people on a criteria of competence where a person has not been received any warnings that they are a waste of space.

3. Staff who are not offered redundancies would probably kick-up hell as well. The trade unions would back them up too. No TU will stand for discrimination or meritocracy.

Moving them to other departments would be great. Once they were removed from the warm dark moist cupboard that is the health service it would be possible to sort the spudz from the sponges. They could no longer on the contacts they have built up or on the flaws in the system. Most of them would probably be glad to be in a functioning environment too. There is nothing more demeaning than a false job.

implement such a plan now and a few years it would start to work, the hse can't always use the unions as an excuse

Another triumph of HSE management. Their actions were predicably going to be condemned by the Courts. HSE wanted to pressurise the drug suppliers/wholesalers to drop prices and decided that the handy way to do that would be to cut the price paid to the chemists, leaving the chemists out of pocket. No sign of price drops from the wholesalers of course.

11/09/2008 - 17:51:34
The High Court has found in favour of a group of pharmacies which had taken action over the HSE's decision to cut the amount paid to them for drugs and services under the GMS scheme.

The court found this afternoon that the HSE and Department of Health move - which was aimed at saving the Exchequer millions of euros - had breached their contract with the pharmacies.

A large number of other pharmacies have taken similar cases, and today’s ruling was welcomed by the Irish Pharmacy Union.

The HSE gave no indication this afternoon whether it intends to appeal the ruling.

Good, at long last. We need more doctors and nurses, not managers, and I personally would be happier to see nurses doing more bureaucratic work part time. Medical staff are aware of the ultimate aim of what they do, whereas managers often swing to the viewpoint that their targets/forms/whatever are the be all and end-all which everyone has to bend over backwards to accomodate. Witness the NHS, where bureaucrats were employed to send out letters (I probably still have some of them!) to ask if you wanted to be on the NEXT 6 month waiting list (this is how they fulfilled their promises that no-one be on a waiting list for more than 6 months. Instead, they could have simply employed a few more nurses/docs and reduced the lists the legit way.

Fume. War on bureaucracy... we have far too much of it and it operates like an effective tax on us all. More action and real production, fewer form fillers. Now THAT would increase competitiveness.