€28m spent by HSE on outsourcing recruitment 'throwing good money after bad'
Firms Peter Hse Byrne/pa Recruitment The Paid 73m Last €15 Picture: Year
The HSE has been accused of "throwing good money after bad" in spending more than €28m on outsourcing recruitment over three years.
The amount being paid to recruitment firms has been increasing each year, with €2.88m spent in 2020; €9.78m paid out the following year, and €15.73m handed over last year.
However, the HSE cannot say how many staff have been hired as a direct result of this spending as this information is not held centrally by HR and neither does the the finance department have access to it.
The amount spent by each of the HSE regions also varies greatly. The HSE North West and Mid West, which covers a number of counties from Donegal down to parts of Tipperary, spent by far the most, with €8.78m paid out in 2022 alone. This compares to the HSE North Dublin area, which paid €187,582 on private recruitment services last year.
No data for the South Region, which covers Cork and Kerry, is available, as the HSE said the data is sourced from regional finance ledgers and due to "systems and resource limitations" they are unable to extract the data.
The HSE also added that is not possible to identify within the finance systems the specific areas or counties for which the recruitment firms were recruiting.
Labour health spokesperson Duncan Smith said if a fraction of the money that is being "wasted" on private contractor recruitment was invested into paying wages of healthcare workers, "we could ensure the safe staffing levels that organisations like the health trade unions are crying out for".
He said there should be an aggressive recruitment and retention plan in place across all further and higher education institutions to encourage young people training in the area to stay in the Irish health service.
"The Department of Health seems determined to throw good money after bad. The scale of the monies involved in outsourcing recruitment beggars belief," he said.
Responding to a parliamentary question from Mr Smith, the HSE's general manager of corporate finance, Sarah Anderson said: "I regret to inform you that the information you have requested in relation to ‘the number and type of staff recruited by such firms in each county’ is not available from the finance systems.
She said costs associated with private recruitment firms can include recruitment advertising costs, placement fees, and recruitment expenses, and likely include some agency pay in some cases.
Her letter added: "The shortcomings in the HSE legacy financial systems are well acknowledged and their replacement by a single standard financial system for the health sector is at the core of the finance reform programme initiated by the Department of Health."
The HSE said employment levels at the end of September show there were 143,075 whole-time equivalents directly employed in the provision of health and social care services and the various Section 38 hospitals and agencies.
"The overall increase accounting for the impact of turnover on recruitment since 31 December 2019 now stands at +23,258 WTE [whole time equivalent]," Ms Anderson stated.