HSE paying 60 doctors €43k extra each for admin roles

Almost 60 of the country’s best paid doctors are receiving an extra €43,000 each a year in allowances from the cash-strapped health service to take up largely administrative hospital roles.

The sum is confirmed in new HSE figures outlining the depth of allowance pay-outs in the system which is struggling to find funds to treat patients.

According to the financial details, revealed at the latest Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) meeting yesterday, the HSE paid out €166.5m via 41 separate allowances to 36,887 workers across the service last year.

This figure — which does not count extra payments for night duty, weekend work, overtime, on-call hours and locum costs, despite the fact other public services describe these rates as allowances — includes more than €2.5m to 59 consultants.

This rate means each of these doctors, whose basic salaries average out at close to €200,000, make an additional €43,000 a year from allowances linked to their largely administrative clinical director roles.

The €166.5m allowance outlay last year — which the HSE argued is in fact just 2.61% of its total €6.4bn payroll in 2011 — was largely spent on nurses.

In total, €86.9m was given to nurses, €36.2m to care and support staff, €29.2m to people working in medical/dental services and €4.74m to health and social care professionals.

A further €9.25m in allowances were provided to management and administrative staff last year.

HSE director general designate, Tony O’Brien, and HSE human resources national director, Barry O’Brien, said the costs come from 41 allowances provided by the system.

Of these, 31 are seen as “legacy” payments dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, with nine of this second grouping “red circled” — meaning they are no longer available to new staff.

An exact list of each of these allowances was not provided to the Irish Examiner by the HSE at the time of going to press.

The HSE was similarly criticised by the PAC committee for failing to provide a breakdown by salary category of who is receiving the allowances and why.

Fine Gael TD Simon Harris said this is a key point which must not be over-looked in any discussion about taxpayer-funded allowances.

He said while some are going to highly-paid employees, which will cause public anger, others are provided to lower- level workers who are already struggling to support themselves without having to cope with further cutbacks.

The HSE officials also confirmed under questioning that they are planning to further reduce health service staff numbers by another 6,000 within the next two years.

They said payroll outsourcing was being considered as part of this process as it will mean administrative staff in its human resources sector can transfer their support to frontline medics.

Sinn Féin TD Mary Lou McDonald asked why a system so chronically in debt should even consider such a major outsourcing project.

However, HSE director general designate Tony O’Brien said the freeing up of staff caused by outsourcing might in fact save the State money.

The HSE is due to send a more detailed breakdown to the PAC in the coming days.