HSE misses December recruitment target 

HSE aimed to hire an additional 12,500 staff by April this year. Picture: Pexels

The HSE has failed to meet a December target to recruit 5,000 staff under a €600 million winter plan that promised to recruit an extra 12,500 staff by April this year.

Almost 2,600 new staff have been recruited, of whom 2,323 have started work. A further 2,917 new staff have accepted positions and are going through the clearance process.

A further 4,026 posts are at various stages of the recruitment process, bringing the total number of posts actively being filled to over 9,500.

Staffing levels are up by more than 5% across the health service - including in section 38 hospitals and agencies - in the past year.

The €600 million funding boost was announced last September as the health service faced a range of challenges, from providing Covid and non-Covid care, increased seasonal demand, and growing waiting lists and pre-dated the third wave of Covid-19 infections.

At the time, the HSE admitted that the commitments came with a “health warning”.

“The HSE has embarked on an ambitious programme of recruitment for both the maintenance of existing health services but also to meet the requirements of the Winter Plan. This programme commenced in the latter part of 2020,” a spokesperson for the HSE said.

The HSE said posts were being filled to support Covid-19 test and trace functions and other health service developments.

Overall staffing levels increased across the health service and Section 38 voluntary hospitals and agencies by 5.3% or 6,357 whole time equivalent (WTE) posts over the past year.

At the end of the year there were 144,113 staff working across 126,174 WTE posts across health and social care services.