General health service workers feel demoralised and undervalued and find it increasingly difficult to get their seniors in the Health Service Executive to make decisions on anything, a conference has been told.
John Hanley, an environmental health officer in Roscommon, told a special Impact health conference in Dublin yesterday that the most suitable people may not have been chosen for management posts in the HSE.
He said he attended a presentation recently from managers who were unable to even get laptops working. "It was just like a Podge and Rodge Show," he said.
His comments came amid a lengthy debate about the problems staff face since the establishment of the HSE. The conference heard it was time the voices of health services workers, other than nurses and doctors, were heard.
Seán Scanlan, a social worker in Carlow, told the meeting the HSE should be spending its money more wisely, rather than on glossy magazines and videos.
A recent HSE transformation video, which had to be shown by senior staff to their colleagues, was "the biggest load of ballsology" he had ever seen, he said.
He joined the health service to make a contribution to the lives of patients but it was becoming more difficult to do so because of the millstones around their necks.
Social workers were still not given mobile phones and staff ceilings meant children could wait months to be seen, he said.
Mr Scanlan claimed it was now "bewildering, frustrating and demoralising" to work as a social worker with the HSE, he said.
Niamh Moore, a clerical officer in the Rotunda Hospital, said she was one of the "bureaucratic pen-pushing administrators" that politicians and the media were blaming for driving the health service into the ground.
But without them, she said, hospitals would have nobody to type letters, make appointments, answer phones or pay staff. "The politicians believe that by pitting clerical against clinical, the spotlight will be taken off the shambles they are making of the so-called health reforms," she said.
Many delegates criticised the lack of planning for new services.
Edwina Jones, a medical physicist in Dublin, said government plans for a network of radiotherapy services for cancer patients across the State by 2011 may not be achievable because of a shortage of medical physicians and there were no plans to train them.
She said these physicists, whose role it is to ensure doses of radiotherapy prescribed for patients is delivered accurately, could take seven years to train to a point where they would be capable of running a radiotherapy unit.
There was also criticism of the use of costly outside consultants to write reports which staff felt they would be more than capable of doing. Margaret Coughlan, a catering officer in Wicklow, said she wanted to see a total ban on the use of outside consultants.
Delegates were also highly critical of the hoops they had to go through to get replacements for staff who are ill or on extended leave. Rosaleen Flanagan from Roscommon said because of lots of form-filling, her accounts office had to wait 14 weeks for a replacement for sick colleagues.
"I'm sending a very clear message to Brendan Drumm that he should allow his managers to manage," she said. "It's a disgrace at the moment."
Peter McLoone, Impact general secretary, said the Irish Congress of Trade Unions would take up the issues raised with the Taoiseach and Minister for Health. There was now "a gulf" between the corporate HSE and the thousands of staff working to deliver a quality health service and that was something that required a political intervention.