Fórsa has reached an agreement that will see 450 agency staff in Tusla moved onto fixed-term contracts.

The HSE has agreed to meet Fórsa over its chief executive Paul Reid’s public statement on the need for “targeted” voluntary redundancies among “management” posts sometime next year. This comes after the union wrote demanding that the agency conform to public service agreements.

The HSE has agreed to Fórsa’s demand for a union-management assessment group to ensure that effective clinical governance in health and social care professions is maintained in new community health structures currently being tested in pilot ‘network learning sites.’

The gap between earnings in the public and private sectors narrowed between 2015 and 2018, despite the fact that significant restoration of crisis-era pay cuts took place in that period. A new report from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) found that, in those years, the pay differential ranged from -3.8% to +7.1%, depending on how it’s measured.

The biggest increases in the HSE’s bill for agency staff, in the year to June 2019, were in the two categories of health and social care professionals (HSCP) and central support, which includes admin.

A tech company that ‘gender-proofed’ its recruitment adverts saw an 80% increase in the number of women recruited into technical positions, according to a new report on female participation in senior management roles.