Hospital worker gets €60k to retire despite spending 18 years on sick leave

A HOSPITAL worker was given almost €60,000 to leave the HSE under last year’s “cost-saving” voluntary retirement and redundancy schemes — despite being on unpaid sick leave for 18 years.

Documents obtained by the Irish Examiner show the unnamed employee was one of 61 HSE South staff paid to leave despite not being on the state payroll. Twenty people had been off it for five years or more. The figures are detailed by an HSE internal audit examination of the exit schemes.

According to the 26-page document, 232 of the 2,003 people who initially took up the national programme to cut health service payroll costs were based in the HSE South. But 61 of those had not worked in the system “for an extensive period”. They included a former worker who had been on unpaid sick leave since 1992, when his paid sick leave had expired.