HSE needs zero tolerance of absenteeism, says chairman

THERE must be zero tolerance of absenteeism, the newly appointed head of the Health Service Executive insisted yesterday.

HSE chairman Dr Frank Dolphin said a halving of the absenteeism rate in the health service would save €100m a year.

Dr Dolphin, a clinical psychologist and one of the country’s leading entrepreneurs, said the current absenteeism rate of about 5% equated to around two working weeks a year for all staff.

The founder of the successful services business – Rigney Dolphin in Waterford, was appointed HSE chairman by Health Minister Mary Harney almost two months ago.

He was in Tullamore, Co Offaly, yesterday to make his first public address at the annual conference of the Irish Association of Directors of Nursing and Midwifery (IADNAM).

“We need to introduce a zero tolerance culture towards absenteeism. There are major costs associated with this,” he said.

Dr Dolphin said he believed it had been made too easy in the past for what he termed as the “non-genuine” cases of absenteeism.

Now that there was a moratorium on staff recruitment, it was crucial that absenteeism rates were cut because of the pressure it put on staff who were reporting for duty.

“Our challenge here is to strike a balance between ensuring genuine incidents are dealt with humanely while, at the same time, driving inefficiency out of the system.”

He also said it would be challenging to achieve cost savings of around €600m a year and would require delving deeply into all areas of the health service.

Achieving the savings would require radical thinking but in doing that the primary focus would be on protecting frontline staff.

Dr Dolphin said people’s healthcare expectations had “rocketed” and shifting sands of public opinion had brought its own challenges.

“The public now have a voracious appetite for excellence in all walks of life including healthcare. This is driven in part by the web which is presenting us with informed and educated patients – maybe not always right, but informed,” he said.

“The extraordinary thing about this is that people, instead of seeing the improvements that we are making, focus on what we don’t or can’t do,” he said.

Unfortunately, the good things about the health service were glossed over.

IADNAM president Dr Mary Boyd, who is director of nursing at Cork University Hospital, told delegates that the moratorium on staffing would not go away simply because they wished it to.

“The inconvenient truth is that Ireland Inc is, to put it politely, ‘financially embarrassed’ and is set to remain so for many years into the future,” she said.

Dr Boyd said the moratorium was not a deliberate and singular attack on nurses or midwives.

“It is, whether we like it or not, an expedient determined upon by those who hold the purse strings – and find that the purse is feeling unpleasantly light and getting lighter by the day,” she said.

Dr Boyd said directors of nursing and midwifery had to decide how they would deal creatively with the challenges now facing them because of the economic downturn and not just talk endlessly about them.