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THE TOP PAID individual in the Health Service Executive (HSE) last year received pay of almost €600,000.
According to the HSE’s just published annual report and accounts for 2016, they show that the individual received pay between €580,000 and €590,000 last year – more than three times the annual salary of €185,000 enjoyed by both Taoiseach Enda Kenny and the HSE’s Director General Tony O’Brien.
Only one other staff member received a salary in excess of €550,000 and that was an employee who received between €560,000 and €570,000 – no employee at the HSE received pay in excess of €550,000 in 2015.
Last year, a further nine staff members received pay between €300,000 and €370,000.
In total, 2,243 staff members at the HSE last year received pay over €100,000 last year compared to 2,124 in that earning bracket in 2015 – a rise of 119.
Leon Farrell / RollingNews.ie
Leon Farrell / RollingNews.ie / RollingNews.ie
A HSE spokeswoman said that the remuneration “includes additional payments such as overtime, allowances, arrears, rest day payments, and records show that during 2016 there were a number of Labour Relations Commission rulings which resulted in once off payments being made to a small number of staff”.
She said: “Some of these additional payments relate to periods greater than one year and therefore significantly distort the actual basic salaries earned.”
A closer look at the figures
The majority of the high earners at the HSE would be medical consultants – though no breakdown is provided in the accounts between consultants and others.
The breakdown shows that 24 staff members received pay between €250,000 and €300,000; 207 in receipt of salaries between €200,000 and €250,000; 1,070 between €150,000 and €200,000 and 931 between €100,000 and €150,000.
The rise in stellar pay by the high-fliers at the health service comes against the background of the HSE’s total pay bill last year increasing by 4% from €4.9 billion to €5.1 billion.
During 2016, numbers employed by the HSE increased from 107,275 to 110,258.
Pay to key management personnel at the HSE – made up of the Directorate – last year totalled €1.23m – down from the €1.42m paid out in 2015.
The accounts also reveal that the spend on lump sum pension payments to those retiring last year totalled €108.3m – a 9% rise on the €99.58m paid out in 2015.
The spend on agency staff also increased by 7% going from €259.29m to €277.33m while the HSE’s overtime bill increased by 16.5% going from €127.74m to €148.9m.
Under ‘pay’, the HSE’s ‘night-time’ allowance bill increased by €10m to €73m while the spend on ‘weekend’ allowances declined from €164m to €160m.
Elsewhere, the accounts show that the HSE’s spend on legal and professional fees increased by 28.6% going from €47m to €60.5m.
The State Claims Agency (SCA) manages claims being made against the HSE for damages and the accounts show that the HSE’s estimated liability for active claims soared during the year by just under €400m to €1.92 billion.
Total spend
The accounts – signed off by the HSE Directorate on 16 May – reveal that €1.6 billion relate to active claims in respect of clinical care while €253m relates to active claims in the non-clinical care area.
The accounts also reveal that the HSE has recouped €34.05m in an insurance claim from the catastrophic damage to Letterkenny General Hospital as a result of flooding in July 2013.
A note attached to the accounts states that “these proceeds are to be allocated against expenditure in both revenue and capital to fund the rebuild programme”.
RollingNews.ie
RollingNews.ie
The total spend at the HSE last year amounted to €14.57 billion – a rise of 5% on the €13.89 billion and the accounts state an additional €500m from government last July represented “a significant commitment to ensuring that our health and social care services were placed on a more sustainable financial footing for 2016 and marked a move away from the practice of allocating supplementary funding at the year-end”.
In his report on the annual accounts, Comptroller and Auditor General, Seamus McCarthy states that his audit “identified a significant level of non-competitive procurement that is consistent with the findings in previous years”
McCarthy said: “There was a lack of evidence of competitive procurement in relation to 49% by value of the sample of payments examined at five locations in the HSE. The total value of the sample was €30.8m.”
In his comment in the report on the issue, CEO Tony O’Brien states: “The scale and complexity of the HSE’s overall procurement activity is such that it will take a sustained focus over a number of years in order to achieve high levels of adherence to procurement rules.
All public sector jobs, salaries and allowances should be made public on a ‘live’ website for everyone to see. Full transparency right across the sector. Then taxpayers can perform real comparisons instead of these flaky reports every once in a while. Anything paid for by the taxpayer should be transparent in realtime. It can be done.
Don’t know if the health salaries are on there but some public service sectors are. I’m sure if you do some searching you will find the info you are after.
It’s best to do a little google search to check before posting things from your head.
Ok, so what did they do? Were they worth the money? Are they a consultant on which lives depend and if we dont pay them this amount of money will they leave??
@Stephen Coveney: no they won’t leave. They won’t earn that kind of money anywhere in the world, Disgraceful to pay that amount of money to any individual & people on waiting lists for years, simply they are not worth it
@Murf: About 350 vacant Consultant posts nationally. In some hospitals the problem is so bad that the hospitals’ futures are in serious medium or long term doubt. The can’t get Consultants on standard rates and instead pay multiples for locus who don’t have to take any associated responsibilities
why is HSE director Tony O Brien getting the same salary as the Taoiseach-sure all he does is come on the telly now and again to do a bit of spoofing-mind you that’s much the same job description as the Taoiseach.
This is a joke huge salaries for a third world health service while the rest of use work just as hard of not harder for pennies.
What can we do to stop this? ??
@Colin Brady: I wouldn’t quite call it a 3rd world health service. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)30818-8/fulltext
That’s a recent lancet report showing Ireland is 13th for health access and quality index. We’re ahead of countries like USA, and the UK.
Despite the long emergency dept and outpatient wait times, we have a health service that will basically pay for anything with evidence of helping you, and most people agree that it works well once you do manage to get seen.
Consultants are extremely well paid, but then they are very intelligent people who have worked extremely hard to do what they do, and whether we like to believe it or not, there are better opportunities for them in other English speaking countries, so many posts here will go unfilled.
@Stephen Coveney: its in every part of the civil service. retire at sixty, nice little lump sum, massive % of salary as pension, get a part time job. kick back and relax while the private sector and, more so, the self employed, stress themselves to death about what will happen to them in later life.
@Stephen Coveney: no wonder my blood pressure is constantly up! Level the playing field and let there be no public and private sectors just one big employed sector and stop these stupid payments to this drain on society!!! My rest day is Saturday & Sunday and lucky to get much rest on these days let alone get paid!!!!
Are the HSE in compliance with FEMPI ? Or are these Topup’s outside standard pay terms and conditions for Public services. the disclosures in St John of God HSE Audit that the Journal haven’t covered ??? Governance of All organisations and Companies . We need to question why ?
@PVD: most of extra cash is for doing extra services outside of their normal working week. For example clearing an endoscopy waiting list by working on a Saturday. Also if you have to cover the work of an empty post then you should be paid. There arr hundreds of unfilled posts but the patients still have to be seen. Many doctors are working 1.5 times what they are contracted to do
The HSE continue to pay exorbitant locum rates for extra consultants because they refuse to restore pay parity after cutting salary by 30% during austerity.
Now nobody will (rightly) take consultant positions where they will have to do the same work as their colleagues for 30% less pay.
So the HSE spend even MORE paying the same doctors locum rates to fill the posts temporarily instead of backing down and paying everyone equally. (Bit like the way they refuse to pay a small increase in rent allowance to prevent homelessness but will then fork out for hotel rooms to accomodate the same families…)
No wonder there are hundreds of unfilled consultant posts and long waiting lists. I won’t be taking one until equal pay is restored.
but lets be clear; most of them are overpaid for the job they do. they need to be taken down a peg or two and helped realise that they are a part of society and that serve society. they are a clique, a cartel. along with the pharmacists who insist on dispensing branded drugs. none of them working in the public interest.
@Living The Laws: lets get the facts on the table, complete transparency on expenditure so that informed decisions can be made. No point in speculating as to who got what and at what rates, those figures are scandalous no matter how God like the top consultants think they are. Get the figures out for all, allowances, o/t, pension lump sum payments – we know that these are crocks of gold but let’s see the numbers.
sure, lets sit down and look at it. form a committee. populate it with our buddies so we can pay them some of the gold also. in two years, lets have an inquiry. and on and on
no sean, witch hunts don’t work when the entire thing is a coven of incompetence. heads should roll now.
and simon harris will be first. good timing for Leo, don’t you think?
The poor underpaid and overworked hospital consultants. God help them. Would their union not push for a pay rise for them before they head off to Australia? Let’s get some transparency on the allowances, overtime and pension lump sum payments. Categories of staff and average pay outs would be a start. Let’s also see the absenteeism rate. The unions spin enough yarns about their poor underpaid members. Let’s get the facts on the table.
The new consultant contract is €110,000 pa so I doubt that those very high earners were standard consultants or maybe not even medical consultants at all. Do we know if they were HSE in house?
a health service that makes you feel sick. now thats as irish as it gets.
110,000 staff. theres something wrong. very wrong. farmer gael really have managed the recovery into a disaster and given two fingers to the back breaking and soul destroying efforts of the citizens of ireland.
everywhere you look are signs that farmer gael have managed to miss the opportunity to build on the sacrifice of the citizens. when you look at how poor the services are in the hse, and how expensive they are, you have to conclude there is something very wrong. look at medicines and pharmacies purposely providing branded instead of generics. or the mark up that primary care services charge on top of the government government contribution.
add to that, so many payments that are beyond anything that should be paid to these guys in the HSE, and you have to think someone is on the gravy train at the expense of the citizens.
and it is all farmer gael’s fault. plain and simple. they are accountable.
@Lydia McLoughlin: a rest day payment is to pay doctors who were working on call without enough colleagues to relieve them. E.g. If you worked 73 hrs over a weekend, you should have had the Monday off, but because there was no one to see patients on Monday the same doctor had to do it. This went on for decades and these older consultants never got their time back in lieu. So the HSE had to either allow them to take early retirement or lay them for these hours retrospectively. In fairness no one should work for free and these doctors propped up services for decades before they got new colleagues to ease the burden
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