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The chief executive of the HSE, Paul Reid has said there is ‘no black hole’ in its budget and there would be no adjustment of hundreds of millions.
He was speaking after The Business Post reported a claim that there was “sloppiness” in the HSE’s financial reporting and said Department of Health officials spoke of the prospect of a prior year adjustment in its budget for 2020 that was probably in the region of “hundreds of millions”. It said there were “fake targets” for hiring staff and that a target of hiring 10,000 staff in 2022 was not going to be met.
The claims were reported to have been made by Department of Health officials at a meeting on January 27th.
The report did not reflect the “very collaborative, constructive, obviously challenging relationships between ourselves and the Department of Health on many issues”, Mr Reid said.
The Business Post reported details of the discussion between the officials who did not know they were being recorded, saying the issues raised were in the public interest.
Mr Reid told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland that the report did not reflect the HSE’s focus on the big issues which were waiting lists, reform of regional health areas and recovering from Covid and its impact.
Mr Reid said. “There is no black hole. What is happening is a process that is ongoing jointly between ourselves and the department which is an assessment of potential technical, financial adjustment and that’s a process that has been initiated by ourselves, the HSE, our audit and risk committee and the board to look at certain levels of provisions and accruals at the end of the year and all that is done to give assurance to the board, the Department and the Oireachtas, that certain cash management that we have, it will not involve any potential increase in expenditure.”
‘Unfortunate’
The comments in the report were “unfortunate and not accurate”, he said. “The adjustment, if we do it, it will be less than €100million.”
Mr Reid acknowledged that there was not an integrated financial system, one was being designed. “It will take a number of years to be fully rolled out, will come live at different stages. It is a gap, a requirement – we’re highly committed to it.”
Mr Reid said he had been surprised at the comments. “Regardless of the floweriness of the commentary, it’s the issues specifically related to recruitment and finance issues, factually they are incorrect and I’m happy to record them.
“Some of the commentary around the targets. . . if you take the recruitment specifically – if you look at what we have recruited since January 2020, about 24,000 people have been recruited into the health service, about 12,5000 net increase in our employees, about 9,500 people that are on leave that we have to recruit for and about 2,500 to 3,000 people on our contact tracing and vaccination centres.
“So when we set out to do the service plan for 2020 we have funding and we secured funding and are really appreciative of it, from Government for the 10,000 recruited staff.” However, he said there was a “really difficult market” for health professionals and “the reality of it would probably be somewhere around 5,500, however, we are still striving to recruit up to funded level of 10,000”.
Mr Reid said that if a target cannot be reached, the HSE informs the Minister. We “advised the Minister and advised the department that the reality of what the market may facilitate would be about 5,500, but we would pull out all the stops to achieve further than that and that’s exactly what we set out in our national service plan. So it’s actually good practice the way we’ve gone about it.”
Mr Reid said: “We work very closely with the department – we have an extremely competent board, an extremely capable audit and risk committee that we work these issues through and indeed jointly with the department so as we work through our score card every month and as we work through reviews with the department.”
‘Disappointing’
The HSE on Sunday night said: “The matters referred to in the newspaper article relate to shared issues between the HSE and the Department of Health which have been the subject of many constructive discussions between us.
“The characterisation of these issues, and in particular the disparaging language used about identifiable individuals including senior managers and our board, is very disappointing.”
The HSE said it was “deeply disappointing” to see phrases such as “fake targets” being used in relation to recruitment.
On the target of hiring 10,000 staff in 2022, the HSE said: “We conducted a rigorous process of analysing labour market projections and the likely growth trajectory of staff, and concluded that we were confident of recruiting a minimum of 5,500 additional staff in 2022.
“We told the department of this, and agreed that while we would target a minimum 5,500 increase, we would also aim to improve on that figure as much as possible.”
On its financial reporting, the HSE said there would not be an adjustment in the order of “hundreds of millions of euro” to its accounts, and the HSE “never indicated to the department that there would be”.
It said there may be a technical accounting adjustment of a much smaller amount. “If this happens, it will reduce not increase the level of reported expenditure.”
On financial governance, the HSE said there was a “very proactive and rigorous approach” to oversight duties and it did not recognise the reported comments made by the officials as “being accurate”.