HSE must treat its staff better, expert warns
A LEADING health expert has said the HSE needs to concentrate on treating its top-ranking personnel better in the wake of the departure of Tony Holohan and Ronan Glynn as Chief and Deputy Chief Medical Officer.
Speaking to the Irish
Mail on Sunday, DCU’s Professor of Health Systems Anthony Staines said the appointment of the next Chief Medical Officer is ‘crucial’, and said a higher salary is not the only lure of the private sector.
‘There’s a lot of stuff in the HSE around HR, around culture, around money, around staff support that isn’t happening, that should be happening. And that’s something the private sector often – not always, but often – gets right.’
Mr Staines was speaking after Dr Ronan Glynn announced this week he would step down from his role as Deputy CMO at the end of this month to take up a job with consultancy firm Ernst and Young.
‘The HSE has to make itself an attractive place for rising doctors, nurses, physios, whatever, to make careers,’ said Mr Staines.
‘There’s a lot of evidence about job retention in business literature and it all says yes, salaries matter, but what actually matters more is autonomy at work, respect at work, adequate resources to do your job. All of that matters more to most people than just their take at the end of the month.’
He pointed to a staff grading issue that could put candidates off applying for a Deputy CMO job: they are in the pay band of ‘mid-level’ civil servants rather than consultants.
‘Their equivalents in most countries are on consultant contracts,’ he said. ‘And that matters a lot now because there are now consultant-grade contracts in public health.’
Consultant posts were created in public health during the pandemic.
Management consultant and former Sláintecare member Dr Eddie Molloy also believes this lack of opportunity has created a perception of public health as a second-class system among medical practitioners.
He told the MoS: ‘Public health has had very low status within the health system for a long time. I recall a number of years ago, when I expressed surprise at how little emphasis there seemed to be on public health, a senior HSE manager responded “Public health is only for failed doctors”.
Mr Staines praised the ‘very capable, very calm, very clear’ Dr Glynn, as well as Dr Holohan, for their handling of the pandemic, and said public scorn could be another deterrent to CMO candidates.
A spokesman for the
HSE said: ‘There is a global shortage of healthcare workers and it is in this context that the HSE has established its recruitment and resourcing plans. The retention of all health and social care workers remains a key pillar of the resourcing strategy for the HSE, coupled with ambitious international recruitment to close the resourcing gap.’