Health Service Executive staff at a Co Leitrim office have received €50,000 in overtime for processing the 4,300 lump sum retirement payments paid out by the executive this year.
At the executive’s West Forum annual general meeting in Galway yesterday, assistant national director for finance, Liam Minihan revealed the overtime payments to staff working at the HSE’s Manorhamilton office.
Mr Minihan said all of the retirement payments nationally were processed through the HSE’s Manorhamilton office.
He said the processing of claims that would normally be carried out over a 12 month period had been done in two months .
Chair of the HSE West Forum, Cllr Pádraig Conneely (FG) asked: “So we paid €50,000 in overtime to process the retirement payments?”
Mr Minihan’s HSE colleague, Pam Connolly told the meeting that the work by the staff at Manorhamilton involved a lot of background work to confirm the years served by the staff retiring.
She said: “It wasn’t just a matter of calculating the payments that had to be made.”
A HSE report circulated at the meeting yesterday confirmed that the overtime payments to the Manorhamilton staff contributed to the HSE West being €26.3 million over budget for the first four months of the year.
However, Mr Minihan’s report recorded that overtime payments across the west – stretching from Donegal to Limerick and North Tipperary – was actually down for the first four months of this year on the corresponding period last year.
The report confirmed that overtime payments in the hospital groups in the Midwest and Galway/Roscommon were down 8 per cent this year.
The report confirmed that overtime payments were €15.6 million for the four months and down €1.55 million on the corresponding period last year.
