Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 9 July 2019

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Budget Management and Control of Health Expenditure in the context of Budget 2020: Discussion

Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

What we are doing is living within the resources that we have and growing the number overall within the resources that we have. The control we have in place at the moment effectively states that no additional staff can be put in and that agency and overtime levels, which are in the hundreds of millions, are capped. We have 54,000 staff in the acute hospital sector alone. Within that totality of staff, at the level it is at, other than for specific Department of Health-funded new developments, which can proceed and are proceeding, that is the resource that is available until we get the thing onto some sort of a sustainable footing, unless-----