A HEALTHCARE MANAGER has highlighted numerous issues with recruitment practices in the HSE – saying workers on panels were bypassed for jobs, and roles that were vacant at the end of last year are now deemed ‘non-existent’.
She said a national physiotherapy panel that was created in March of this year, following dozens of interviews, has been ignored while managers were encouraged to recruit internationally instead during a recent hiring embargo.
This is at least the second Health and Social Care Professionals (HSCP) panel on which staff have been bypassed for jobs in the HSE in recent months, The Journal understands.
HSCPs work in areas such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy, counselling and psychotherapy, optometry, social work and radiography.
As reported by The Journal last weekend, 13 HSCP roles were filled via international recruitment during the embargo - much to the frustration of staff on panels.
The manager, who oversees a HSCP team in Dublin, said she was urged to use the “loophole” of hiring staff from abroad during the recruitment freeze.
She said some roles were hired via this route during the embargo, but managers refused to hire more senior roles in this manner despite coming under “pressure” from the HSE to do so.
A recruitment freeze, which was put in place as a cost-saving measure, was in effect from October 2023 to July 2024. International recruitment can still take place during a freeze, as needed.
The manager compared the current approach to recruitment – where roles vacant at the end of 2023 “no longer exist” and managers have been asked to prioritise certain positions over others – to “a Hunger Games exercise”.
The HSE previously told The Journal that international recruitment is “considered where our own domestic recruitment activity failed to result in a qualified and competent candidate for particular roles”.
However, a HSCP worker last week said she and others on a panel were bypassed for jobs during the embargo.
The manager we spoke to this week confirmed that staff on another panel had been bypassed too. People placed on this panel, specifically for physiotherapists, earlier this year were also not offered roles, she said.
“The vacant staff-grade roles that we have filled with the international applicants this year were never offered to the panel formed in March.
Why were we not allowed to recruit from a panel that was already in existence?
The manager said some senior physios who would typically carry out the interviews to create a panel like this didn’t participate in the process this year.
“I encouraged all of my senior staff to not participate this time because we could see this coming. We knew we weren’t going to be able to recruit.
“You’re looking at maybe a senior clinician taking a week off work to go and interview 60, 70 people – that’s a week of patients not seen.
“The seniors who normally would help out with those interviews this year didn’t participate because they could see the writing on the wall. We knew that panel was never going to be used.”
The manager said she is not against international recruitment in general, but it is unfair to make staff interview for panels that are never used.
The manager said she and her colleagues “advocated for national recruitment for more senior posts and refused to participate in international recruitment efforts for these posts despite pressure” from the HSE.
“We had been encouraged to use the international recruitment option as a way of filling those posts, and we had also been encouraged to use it as a way to fill senior-grade posts,” she told The Journal.
“So we absolutely refused to do the senior-grade posts because the challenge for candidates coming from overseas in the main is coming to a new jurisdiction, a new healthcare system, different training background. They require a significant period of adaptation.
It just wasn’t safe to put them into senior roles where they’re expected to maybe supervise staff grades or make higher level, more complex decisions about caseload management.
The manager said over 50 international candidates were interviewed online for junior physiotherapy positions during the recruitment freeze. The candidates were primarily from Asia and Africa.
Three people were hired and two have since begun working as physios in Dublin. The third person hasn’t started work yet due to a visa delay.
A number of other employees were also hired internationally during the freeze including occupational therapists and social workers, the manager said.
The precarious recruitment situation has been further impacted by the fact “any posts that were vacant at the end of 2023 no longer exist”, the manager told us.
She said there were dozens of physio vacancies alone in Dublin at the end of 2023, but these and many other roles are now effectively gone.
The manager said she was unable to fill several roles late last year because of the embargo. She was hopeful these roles could be filled once the freeze was lifted, but has since been informed this won’t happen.
“Because they were all vacant on the 31st of December 2023, I now can’t seek permission to recruit into what were vacancies – those posts effectively don’t exist anymore.
I’m now still expected to try and somehow miraculously run that service, but I’m not allowed to recruit any staff.
She said the need for these roles is still there, but the positions themselves no longer exist. HSCP managers have been told they can fill a small number of roles across different disciplines, she added, leaving many positions vacant.
“We were asked last week to give our top 10 clinical priorities for posts that need to be filled.
“OT, speech, social work, psychology, nursing are all holding vacancies, but we’ve been asked to kind of do a Hunger Games exercise where we’re going to give our top 10 and hope that maybe we might get to recruit something.”
After the recruitment embargo was lifted last month, the ICTU group of healthcare unions raised concerns over the fact the HSE’s latest staffing strategy “shows that vacancies up to the end of 2023 have been effectively suppressed”.
Albert Murphy, Director of Industrial Relations at the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, said at the time: “What has become clear is that there are still a significant number of vacant posts that went unfilled up to the end of 2023.”
Murphy said the HSE told unions these posts “will have to be considered in the context of the headcount for 2024″, adding: “That is a complicated way of saying that these posts are effectively lost.”
The manager we spoke to said, over a month on, there is still a lack of clarity. She said managers in the health sector have been “hamstrung” and, ultimately the people who suffer are patients and frontline staff.
“It’s really hard for the staff on the ground. We’re seeing our waiting lists getting longer, and you’re worried about patients who are sitting on the waiting list.
“For frontline, front-facing staff, it’s really hard because they’re out there, day in-day out doing their best to try and deliver high quality services, and they’re just coming up against resistance everywhere they go.”
The HSE had not replied to a request for comment at the time of publication.
A spokesperson told The Journal last week that international recruitment is “only ever considered where our own domestic recruitment activity failed to result in a qualified and competent candidate for particular roles”.
“Health and Social Care Professionals practice within a regulated environment, this narrows the available suitable global candidate pool.
“International appointments represent an extremely low percentage of the overall profession. It is only when the national pool has been exhausted that the HSE recruits from the international market,” they added.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say