HSE early retirement is ‘shambolic’

A top businessman who looked into overhauling the British National Health System has said that the Government’s early retirement scheme is “shambolic” and will likely affect vital frontline health services.

Gerry Robinson, a native of Co Donegal and a former chairman of Allied Domecq and a past chief executive of Granada Television, said that the retirement plan, which could result in thousands of health staff quitting by the end of next month, was marked by “a lack of contingency planning”.

Speaking on Newstalk’s Breakfast programme, Mr Robinson said the scheme — which is also impacting on education and on An Garda Síochána — had been handled in “a last-minute kind of way” and meant the HSE would have to tackle any gaps created as a result in a “hand-to-mouth” way.

Mr Robinson had previously appeared in a BBC documentary entitled Can Gerry Robinson Fix the NHS?, where he spent six months looking at practices at Rotherham General Hospital in Yorkshire.

He said yesterday that the HSE was likely to share many characteristics of the NHS and that wastage could be eliminated without affecting patient care.

The retirement scheme has meant approximately 1,500 people have already stepped down so as not to adversely affect their pension packages, while an estimated 2,000 others could take similar steps by the end of February.

Mr Robinson told Newstalk: “What has happened here straightforwardly is what is known as the law of unintended consequences.”

He said many healthcare professionals had made the decision that it was better for them to quit their posts now, with the result that there could be gaps in the system that the HSE would find difficult to fill, something he described as “the worst of all worlds”.

“It is shambolic but to be fair to the HSE, they are now stuck with this particular situation,” he said, adding that this was “an inevitable consequence of the thing not being thought through and not planned”.

Speaking before the Public Accounts Committee this week, HSE chief Cathal Magee said gaps could materialise in services such as community care once the retirements take hold.

He also told the PAC that an estimated €57 million will be saved in the first year following the retirement scheme — just one-third of the expected figure.

Mr Robinson believes tens of millions of euro could be saved through restructuring in the HSE but the early retirement scheme would leave frontline services exposed while backroom staff remained.

“If this was done in a private business somebody would be hung,” he added.