Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I also want to ask about staffing in the health service. In July, the Government announced a lifting of the recruitment embargo in the HSE. However, over the past few weeks I have started to receive desperate calls from staff in multiple departments in my local hospital about a recruitment embargo being imposed in St. Michael's Hospital that is endangering patient safety and means workers are demoralised. I looked into this a bit further because I wondered whether this was a local matter. I then discovered from the INMO, as well as from speaking to people in the National Rehabilitation Hospital and elsewhere, that there is a recruitment embargo under a new name, called a pay and numbers strategy, which has created arbitrary staff ceilings based on posts that were filled in December 2023. The consequence of that is that thousands of unfilled posts at that time have disappeared and been suppressed, leaving our health services understaffed and unsafe.

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