Several staff at a hospital in Cashel, Co Tipperary, are underutilised while another hospital which urgently requires staff to operate a CT scanner cannot get them due to a ceiling being put on its staffing levels, the Dáil public accounts committee was told yesterday.
Brendan Kenneally, a Fianna Fáil TD for Waterford, said he understood a director of nursing, two assistant directors of nursing and five staff nurses were employed at Our Lady's Hospital in Cashel with no patients to look after. "It seems extraordinary that something like that could happen," he said.
Prof Brendan Drumm, chief executive of the HSE, said one of the biggest challenges facing the HSE was a lack of alignment between workload and people.
He added that in 1996 staff working in Cashel got "letters of comfort" saying they could remain in that hospital even if surgical services at the hospital were moved elsewhere. These services were moved to a hospital in Clonmel in early 2007 and some staff remained behind.
But Prof Drumm said they would now become part of the HSE's primary, community and continuing care staff complement and would work with the elderly.
Committee chairman Bernard Allen, a Fine Gael TD for Cork North Central, said Mallow General Hospital got a €1.5 million CT scanner in 2006 which was still idle because of an embargo on recruiting two radiographers to use it. Meanwhile the HSE paid for ambulances to run patients from Mallow up and down to Cork University Hospital five or six times a day for CT scans. This was lunacy, he said.
Prof Drumm said Mallow hospital needed the CT scanning service but was above its employment quota. He said the hospital had 251 staff for its 76 beds.
Asked about the new A&E unit at the Mercy Hospital in Cork, which has been lying idle since it was completed last March, Prof Drumm said negotiations were continuing about staffing levels for the unit. He said the hospital already had a reasonable staffing level with more than 1,000 staff for its 230 beds.
Prof Drumm told the committee the HSE has in the past delayed the development of new facilities in order to use money allocated for such projects to offset its day-to-day running costs in order to balance its budget at the end of the year. But he said it wouldn't happen again.