Spending €250k on HSE staff magazine is ‘crazy’
THE HSE has forked out more than €250,000 over the past two years to produce an internal magazine for staff – a spend that has been described as ‘crazy money’.
Disability rights campaigner and Independent councillor Ann Norton, mother of a special needs teenager, yesterday criticised the HSE for spending €251,790 on Health Matters in 2015 and 2016.
A member of the HSE West Health Forum and Clare County Council, Ms Norton described the spend on the quarterly magazine as ‘a complete and utter waste of taxpayers’ money’.
Ms Norton also said it was ‘crazy money’, adding that ‘instead of producing magazines, the HSE should be using its resources on caring for the sick’.
The expenditure emerged in a letter to Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness from senior HSE official Mary Brodie, on foot of a Dáil question on the costs involved. In her letter, Ms Brodie said the magazine ‘has been produced in its current format since March 2015, following a comprehensive procurement process’.
She continued: ‘In 2015 and 2016, a total of eight editions were produced at a net cost to the HSE of €251,790.
‘This includes the cost of a professional editor provided by the supplier of the service, layout and design, distribution, and the production of an e-zine circulated to all staff on email.’
There is also a print version of the magazine, with a circulation of just under 20,000 copies.
Ms Brodie pointed out to Mr McGuinness that the HSE has a staff of more than 100,000, and said that ‘providing reliable and trusted information and updates to and from our staff is an essential part of our role as an employer’.
She continued: ‘In a very diverse workforce, where many thousands of our teams work without regular access to computers due to their caring roles, a printed magazine plays a central role in team engagement and communications.’
Ms Brodie said Health Matters ‘has an important role in motivating staff to continually strive to provide the best possible service to the public’.
She also said the content and format of the magazine is ‘based on feedback from people working in our health services, informed by both a detailed questionnaire and a series of staff focus groups in 2015’.
‘These indicated the importance in a large public service organisation of maintaining the publication and also ensuring the content was relevant and supportive to the work of the HSE and all our funded healthcare organisations,’ she added.
Ms Brodie further stated: ‘The content for the magazine is generated mainly by health staff who submit articles and photographs on a voluntary basis prior to each edition. Staff are not paid for the articles they write. Staff members also volunteer to distribute the publication within their own work areas and locations.’
However, Ms Norton criticised the level of spending on the publication, and said: ‘The HSE is not there to provide magazines for staff – they are there to provide patient care.’
The councillor’s daughter, Nicole Norton, 19, has cerebral palsy. Councillor Ms Norton contrasted the €125,000-per-annum spend on the magazine with ‘the song and dance’ the HSE made about providing a €600 drug for intrathecal baclofen therapy (IBT) – a treatment used to manage severe spasticity – for Nicole late last year.
Ms Norton is also a director of the Clare Crusaders Clinic, which doesn’t receive any HSE funding and needs to raise €250,000 each year to provide its range of therapies to more than 500 children.
Ms Norton said that with Health Matters’ €125,000 per annum budget, Clare Crusaders could hire an additional three therapists to provide an additional 117 hours of therapies per week.
She said: ‘That’s a lot of therapy, a lot of children and a lot of unstressed parents.’
Ms Norton said that rather than spend the money on the magazine, the HSE should use the funds on patient care and the hiring of more frontline staff.
A spokeswoman for the HSE said yesterday that Ms Brodie’s letter covers the rationale for Health Matters, the costings and the procurement process that was put in place.
She said that the letter addresses the issues raised and explains the ongoing commitment by the HSE to the magazine and the function it serves.
‘Complete and utter waste’ Articles submitted on voluntary basis