In sickness and in health – HSE reveals that 1,100 staff are missing every day

Date Published: 28-Sep-2011

The sickest people in Galway appear to work in the HSE West where 1,100 of their employees are absent every day due to illness – at a cost of €5 million a month.

Even more critically, half of the absentee employees work in HSE frontline services which means they have to be replaced when they are out, and often by agency staff.

Chairman of the HSE West’s Regional Health Forum, Councillor Pádraig Conneely has asked for a breakdown of the reasons given by HSE staff for not turning up for work.

“We must be very sick in the HSE – or is it people out sick on Mondays and Fridays to give them an extended weekend?

“And if it’s the common cold, why are so many of them sick?” he asked at Tuesday’s Forum meeting.

“I don’t think that would happen in the private sector. Something has to be done about it,” he said.

But John Hennessy, Chief Executive of HSE West, said that staff had entitlements under sick pay schemes which meant that as long as they produced a sick cert, they were covered.

However, he accepted that the figure for absenteeism at the moment which ran at five per cent was too high and that they would be looking at ways to bring that down.

See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.