Industrial action by healthcare professionals is to begin from the end of the month as part of a row over recruitment.
Forsa and the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) said the HSE’s Pay and Numbers Strategy has “imposed a fixed employment ceiling across all health services” and suppressed vacant posts as of December 31 2023.
INMO general secretary Phil Ni Sheaghdha said its members wanted to send a message that “moratoriums and severely restricting the recruitment of patient-facing posts is in breach of many safe staffing agreements between healthcare unions and the HSE”.
“Nurses, midwives and other safety-critical professionals within the public health service must have a greater say in how hospital wards and community care areas are staffed.”
The work-to-rule and other non-cooperation action by union members in the HSE and Section 38 voluntary hospitals begins from Monday March 31.
HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster said that in 2020 there were 120,000 people – or whole-time equivalents – employed in the Irish health service.
This has since risen to 148,000, despite a recruitment pause from 2023 until early 2024, and numbers of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals have all increased.
“I think there has been a view created that somehow all recruitment stopped in late 2023 and nothing has happened since,” Mr Gloster told RTE Radio.
“Industrial action is very regrettable at any time,” he added.
“What I’m saying is the extent to which there’s a reaction to a pay number strategy, one would have to be concerned when that reaction is against increasing growing numbers of staff in all of those disciplines, and those numbers continue to grow.
Bernard Gloster (Niall Carson/PA)
“I expect to recruit 6,800 net growth more people between now and the end of the year.”
He added that he was “very happy” with the pay and numbers strategy but admitted there are “winners and losers in that”.
“I’m very happy with it because it has given us more staff. It has meant there will never be a need for a blunt instrument of a moratorium or a pause into the future.
“It means we can continue to add more staff, and it means there’s flexibility in local areas – when one job becomes vacant, to look and say, ‘Do we still need that job, or do we have a different priority?’”
Mr Gloster was also asked about an NHS hospital looking to recruit a full-time doctor who would treat vulnerable patients waiting in emergency department corridors.
The advert for the role at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton said “corridor care” is now the norm.
Asked whether the HSE would start to hire for similar roles, Mr Gloster said: “It’s not something I would favour.
“When we talk about, say, staffing levels, whether it’s nursing, allied health professionals or doctors, we talk about them for the totality of the service they’re working in.
“If we have people on corridors today, or if we have people as extra trolleys on wards, or if we have people in the emergency departments, we work as a system and have a very clear expectation that the team responsible for that person looks after them wherever they are.
“Recruiting specifically for corridors and all that, that would not be in my plans.
“My plans will be to take trolleys down to, hopefully, on an average – and averages are difficult for the public to understand – but on an average, if we could get down to about 280 a day, we would probably have maxed out the capacity. At the moment we’re at 450.”
The average number of people waiting on trolleys last year was 320.
Mr Gloster said that while the number of patients waiting on hospital trolleys had fallen in 2024, it had “slipped in 2025”.
“We have to improve how our healthcare system works across the seven days of the week to ensure we’re at least leaving no stone unturned to the value of people’s comfort.”