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HSE OFFICIALS HAVE said they are looking at whether the rigorous application process for Covid-19 vaccinators can be shortened for qualified clinicians, as the health service prepares to significantly scale up its vaccine programme in the next three months.
The majority of vaccines so far have been administered in hospitals, residential care centres and in GP surgeries. As we move through April, and particularly in May and June, all 38 locations identified as mass vaccination centres are expected to come online.
Around 4,000 people have applied to become part of the dedicated vaccination staff at these centres. These workers will supplement the already trained vaccinators such as hospital staff, GPs and paramedics who have been administering the jabs to date.
While there has been significant interest in the roles, a large cohort of applicants are offering to work only part-time. There have also been some complaints about the level of detail required and the length of time the application process takes. The recruiter, CPL Healthcare, has extended the deadline three times, with a current closing date for applications of 7 April.
This week HSE CEO Paul Reid said the organisation, as an employer, needs “a certain baseline of information”, but he said he had asked HSE human resources and CPL to look at whether the process could be shortened “for those who they know are qualified”.
The recruitment campaign calls on doctors, nurses and paramedics as well as workers from other professions like pharmacists, physiotherapists, dentists and optometrists.
Speaking to The Journal Sinn Féin TD and the party’s health spokesperson David Cullinane said the government needs to outline all of the resources it needs and those it currently has in place as we move into the critical second quarter of this year.
“In terms of vaccinators, we need all hands to the pump, we need to look at anybody who can do it,” he said. “This next phase in the second quarter is so important, we’ll have the 38 mass vaccination centres open and we need to make sure we have staff and capacity when those bigger deliveries of vaccines start to arrive.
“One issue I’m hearing from people who work in hospitals is that we have 2,000 vaccinators who do peer vaccines – so vaccinating other staff – and that’s a combination of nurses and other specialists. They are now being asked to rollout the vaccines in centres too.
Now is that being done because we don’t have the required number of community vaccinators directly hired? If that’s the case, we are taking frontline staff that are needed in our hospitals out of those settings over a number of months at a crucial time in the pandemic. Maybe they always planned to have those people involved, but the more we utilise people like pharmacists, dentists, the defence forces and retired staff, the better.
Part-time staff
Fintan Hourihan, CEO of the Irish Dental Association (IDA), said he has been told that 116 dentists so far have expressed interest and 101 have been deemed eligible, with others currently under review.
He told The Journal that some members have commented about having to “jump through hoops”, but said anyone who has ever worked with the HSE knows the processes have always been rigorous.
“It doesn’t strike me as being unusual and I mean you couldn’t really argue with it, they need to check things like garda vetting, verifying you are a registered dentist or doctor or nurse and so on,” he said. “It just takes time. This may be alien to some dentists who are in private practice who are applying and who may not have gone through the same levels of protocols and procedures.”
He said he had been told in a meeting with a HSE during the week that a large proportion of the 4,000 people who have applied for these roles want to work part-time.
“I had asked them about whether retired dentists and those working in private practice may be able to work part time and they said it is an option, but clearly they need to have a core crew just for continuity purposes,” he said.
The HSE’s Chief Operations Officer Dr Anne O’Connor acknowledged that a significant number of those applying are offering to work only part-time.
“Our key challenge is we do need people who will work more hours,” she said “There are many people out there – just to acknowledge the interest that people have – who want to support the vaccination programme .
“Unfortunately from a service delivery perspective we can’t run it on people who only want to do a small number of hours in a week. So we are looking at how we balance full-time, experienced people with people who are coming in for small numbers of hours.
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“We are also looking in the context of our whole organisation and how we can redeploy existing staff to vaccination and all of that.”
In relation to the application process for vaccinators, she said it takes one hour for someone who is qualified and who “has their paperwork” to complete the process.
“The reality is we need them to go through that process because we have to know that they’re fit to do vaccinating,” she said.
She said the health service is looking at “trying to simplify” the process now, while also ensuring a safe service is delivered.
Salary complaints
This week the Irish Pharmacy Union raised issues with the salary scale for these positions, stating that it is
The Irish Pharmacy Union “considerably less than the rate that was negotiated and agreed between the Department of Health, HSE and IPU”.
“We have raised this with the HSE and also with the Minister for Health seeking assurances that, regardless who is the employer, HSE or agency, the hourly amount payable to a pharmacist for vaccination against Covid-19 services provided in a HSE-run mass-vaccination clinic will be at the agreed rate,” it said in a statement. “The issue still has not been resolved.”
The salary scale for these roles ranges from €35,000 to €50,500, based on the candidate’s experience level.
In a recent response to a parliamentary question from Fine Gael TD Neale Richmond, the HSE said all of those recruited will be appointed into the vaccinator role, regardless of their professional discipline.
The health service said the role is “very specific to the duties of administering vaccinations” and does not include the wider duties and responsibilities typically associated with the individual professional listed.
Mass vaccination centres
So far 13 of the 38 mass vaccination centres are open and some 11,000 people have been trained as vaccinators, including staff at acute hospitals and GPs.
Officials have said between 2,500 and 5,000 vaccintors will be needed to staff these centres, made up of current staff and those hired as part of the recruitment drive.
Up to last weekend 1,250 people had been trained and offered contracts as part of this campaign, with 500 contracts signed so far.
In a statement to The Journal, the HSE said it will require “as many qualified vaccinators as possible in a mix of full and part-time roles, to maintain the Covid-19 vaccination effort over a number of months”.
“The vaccination process is limited only by supply and we will continue to rollout the vaccine programme as fast as supply allows.”
The HSE said full-time staff will be required to work 39 hours a week, but part-time wor is also available.
“During the recruitment process all candidates are asked to outline their availability- the recruiters aim to match candidates’ availability with vaccination centres’ requirements,” it said.
“The application was designed with the aim of recruiting quickly by avoiding future delays in the appointments stage of the recruitment process.
Fast, safe recruitment supports the health services. It has been the experience of the recruiter that if they have to go back to candidates repeatedly to get the necessary documentation it slows down the entire recruitment process and has a negative impact on health services, as it takes longer to recruit staff into key roles.”
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With all the uncertainty and clarity about travel, its up to us as people to ensure we have all the relevant paperwork and documents BEFORE traveling, when this story broke last weekend, some people were already in Malta before the restrictions on free travel were lifted. Stay Safe Ireland ☀️
@VinnoH: The latest travel advice for most countries is readily available online. It is completely the responsibility of those travelling to check it. Ignorance or misinformation is not an excuse
@VinnoH: ‘A Junior Minister Said’, after the last 16 months we have all had, with last minute changes, back tracking and U-turns, and leaky information from some ministers, I would take that advise with a pinch of salt, we need to take responsibility of our own actions, I have been bombarded with Emails from Aer Lingus since Christmas telling me to book and fly abroad, only I can’t, my decision is based on all the relevant information available.
@Luan Willis: The last time I was out of the country was in 2008, for me that’s recent. In my lifetime (I’m 70) I have been out of the country about 6 times.
Everyone knows that Malta is enforcing some of the strictest rules yet these people said ‘rules don;t apply to us’….hope they had to pay for their entire quarantine period.
@Linda Oreilly: why would you hope they have to pay for their entire quarantine period? You sound incredibly bitter. One of our elected representatives tweeted before they traveled that if the DCC did not arrive by then the vaccine card filled out would have been accepted. Given this person’s position their advise was taken. They now have their DCC and will presumably be released for quarantine. Why do you want them to pay the full amount? As a punishment for traveling fully vaccinated id it? You sound like a lovely person…
@Eoin Jackson: We have travelled to Malta lots of times and we always check out the restrictions from their gov. pages. We would never go by what an irish rep would tell us….always better to check the country you are travelling to….
@Linda Oreilly: you really have to be naive to trust irish civil servant advice.. They said that they weren’t able to predict the enormous amount of calls on their coved cert line, that they are overwhelmed with!!
Where I ask you, are their so called experts, with their university qualifications
… What does this have to say about their levels of competence?
@Linda Oreilly: oh no Linda, I 100% agree with you on that front, absolutely spot on! They were foolish, i can certainly agree with that. But at the end of the day, they did not cause much harm only to their own time and pocket. Like id be annoyed if they had forged vaccine passes or something, absolutely! They travelled fully vaccinated without the required paperwork, they were put in MHQ until paperwork was sorted and I would imagine then released. A good lesson for them but I don’t understand the abuse they are getting. Or why they should pay for 2 weeks MHQ if they were only there 2-3 days. Charge them the 2-3 days worth. Like everyone is young at some point and i would like to consider myself still young, learning and going to make mistakes. I wouldn’t like to be vilified for it and I don’t really think these people should be either. Is basically my point.
If you travel to Hungary without the digital cert.
All those entering Hungary (unless transiting) must agree to enter mandatory, legally enforceable 10-day quarantine. If the person has no place of residency in Hungary, they must enter a government designated place of quarantine.
The quarantined individual may request from the authorities’ permission to have two PCR tests conducted within 5 days of arrival, which must be taken 48 hours apart. If the two PCR tests are negative, the authorities can exempt the individual from their quarantine obligation. The cost of the PCR tests must be met by the individual.
So nice to hear our government has their priorities straight. Ffs. Couldn’t get my nephew into a school for 2.5 years, but at least the ignorami helped some fools who travelled knowing those cards would not be accepted or didn’t bother to check.
@Contrary Mary: Country is run by the whims of the media – whoevers story is more click bait worthy- gets into the headlines and gets their issues sorted pronto.
@Andrew English: Why would a minister HERE be the foo l you believed? Do you go to a minister HERE to get a visa to the US? No. You check through your destination’s government.
While Malta may be the outlier if it truly is the only part of the EU not accepting vaccination cards, refusing anything but the DCC still seems entirely reasonable.
That was the whole point of it: so there was one standardised format everyone could recognise that was difficult to forge.
I arrived in Athens today, no request for vaccine cert, no request for a person locator form (PLF) and yet barely allowed on the aerlingus flight because we had trouble producing our PLF. This is a virus you cannot control a virus, end this ridiculous carry on. By the way I do not appreciate the journals editorial control of commentary.
I’m still confused as to what they want, is a digital cert different than the paper cert that was emailed to me during the week even though they contain the same information. Can I go online and download it
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