Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats)
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472. To ask the Minister for Health if consideration will be given to ending the mandatory retirement age for those persons involved in nursing in the public sector in order to help improve staffing levels in view of the current shortage of nurses within the health service and the difficulties in recruiting; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [8554/17]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I will first address the general issue of retirement age. An Interdepartmental Working Group, chaired by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, was established in early 2016. This Group was to examine the issues arising from prevailing retirement ages for workers in both the public and private sectors, in the context of the increase in the State Pension age from 65 to 66 in 2014 and the scheduled further increases to the State Pension age in 2021 and 2028.

The Group, whose Report was agreed by Government last August, considered policy around retirement age in both the public and private sectors, examining implications arising from retirement ages now and in the future. The Group identified a set of framework principles to underpin policy in the area and made a number of recommendations assigned to Government Departments and Employer bodies for follow-up in that regard. A copy of the Report is available online at

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On foot of one of the recommendations of the Report, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, with Public Service employers, was tasked to review the current statutory and operational considerations giving rise to barriers to extended participation in the public service workforce up to and including the current age of entitlement to the Contributory State Pension. This review is currently underway and is expected to be completed by Q2 2017.

In relation to the specific matter of the recruitment and retention of nursing staff there are many initiatives currently underway to improve nursing and midwifery staffing levels throughout the country. In September 2016 the HSE set up a Project Group to review nursing workforce planning, recruitment and retention. The main objectives of this Project Group include identifying current recruitment black spots in a coordinated way and developing measures to incentivise and attract nurses to these essential posts. The HSE is continually running open recruitment campaigns with no closing date to ensure that all eligible applicants for nursing posts can apply at any time to work in public hospitals around the country. The number of nursing and midwifery staff increased by 1,650 whole time equivalents between December 2013 and December 2016, notwithstanding intense global competition for our nurses and midwives and the HSE is committed to increasing the number of permanent nursing and midwifery posts by over 1,200 in 2017.

Given recruitment difficulties in psychiatric nursing special arrangements were introduced last summer to enable retiring nurses return to employment at the rate of pay at which they had retired, rather than the 1st point of the scale rule that generally applies across the public service. A similar arrangement for other nursing categories is under consideration at present, recognising that recruitment is an issue across categories.