Crisis as 1,800 vacancies need to be filled

THE NHS in Northern Ireland is facing a crisis over the number of unfilled posts, a senior official said.

Approximately 1,800 vacancies need to be plugged. The service wants to recruit more people to transform care, Health and Social Care Board chief executive Valerie Watts said.

Some measures to tackle the high suicide rate, improve social care and reforms to set budgets over longer periods have not yet been introduced because no ministers

amount of public money” being spent on agency staff included “exorbitant management fees” to private sector employment agencies.

“This is a failure of manpower planning and an indictment of the failure to address severe staffing shortages across the public sector,” she said.

“This is shown most clearly in those areas that have supposedly are in place at Stormont, officials said.

Ms Watts said: “We are facing into a bit of a resourcing crisis in Northern Ireland in terms of the number of vacancies we are carrying across the health and care system.”

This week the Department of Health announced what it termed a “new era” of GP care.

The NHS plans to recruit 200 extra posts for new multi-disciplinary teams in surgeries in Co Down and the north west.

come through their latest reform phase.” She said the “scandal of under-investment” meant our public services were now built on “employment insecurity, low pay and reduced employment rights”.

Ms Millar said Nipsa would be challenging the “ideologically driven casualisation” of public services, as well as calling for changes to labour laws for greater employment protection for all