Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Next year, we plan on increasing the workforce by several thousand more. There will be more nurses to roll out safe staffing, more clinicians to open more hospital beds, more intensive care beds and community beds, and more professional staff to speed up the pace at which we can build new beds, primary care centres and hospitals. There will be more digital professionals to help us roll out digital health services to patients. In fact, the HSE has been hiring at such a pace that it reached their full hiring targets early this year. Having filled the posts it is funded to fill, which is the third year of record recruitment in a row, at that point the HSE stopped hiring. That is how it works in every school, Garda station, local authority and business. You have money to hire a certain number of people and when you have hired that number you cannot hire any more. That is how it works. Yet, the motion before us describes this approach as disastrous.

Incredibly, the motion decries the mismanagement of the health budget, presumably a reference to the HSE spending more money than it was funded for because it treated a record number of patients.

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