New restrictions on the scale of recruitment of staff in the health service are to be introduced under a confidential policy adopted by the HSE.

An internal memo drawn up by HSE director general Tony O’Brien a fortnight ago maintains that senior management agreed on January 12th last that new interim employment controls were to be put in place from the beginning of this month.

Senior HSE figures on Sunday night maintained the working assumption under the new policy is that one person will have to leave the payroll before another is taken on.

Details of the new restrictions on recruitment have emerged as Government Ministers have highlighted the level of investment and employment in the health service in recent months and have promised to increase further staffing levels in health and other parts of the public service.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny told the Fine Gael Ardfheis on January 23rd his party planned to provide resources to hire an additional 10,000 gardaí, teachers, doctors, nurses and other frontline staff by 2021.

Employment restrictions

However, Mr O’Brien in his memo suggested the new employment restrictions were being put in place after a surge in the numbers recruited in the health service last year.

He said 4,550 additional full-time personnel had been employed last year but recruitment on this scale could not continue.

“While there are undoubtedly valid funded whole-time equivalents within this overall growth, the underlying reality is that this this type of growth is simply unsustainable.”

Mr O’Brien said 358 additional staff were recruited in December 2015 alone. He said employment growth on this scale were “indicative of control weaknesses in certain areas and if unaddressed [were] likely to jeopardise appropriate future investment in health and social care”.

Mr O’Brien’s memo indicated the new interim employment controls would involve “X out before Y in”.

Pay and staffing

Mr O’Brien told his senior executives demonstrating appropriate management of pay and staffing levels from the start of this year represented “an important individual challenge in terms of our credibility with the Department of Health, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, Government etc around financial control and accountability for same”.

Among those additional staff taken on last year were some 100 consultants, nearly 400 non-consultant hospital doctors, more than 800 nurses, almost 1,000 support staff and about 200 therapists.

In a statement on Sunday night, the HSE said each of its divisions – acute hospitals, primary care, mental health, etc – had been given a defined pay allocation for the year. It said a “a funded workforce plan” would be developed by each of the service divisions in the next number of weeks.

“It is expected that service divisions will operate within the pay allocation budgets set for 2016. Divisions will be obliged to adhere strictly to public sector pay policy.

“As vacancies arise, each division will be expected to use the vacancy opportunity to reform and reduce the costs of their respective workforces. They should look at skill-mix and substitution in order to achieve more cost-effective methods of delivering existing levels of service.”