Admin staff needed for vaccine roll-out
by Bernard Harbor
 
Fórsa’s head of health, Éamonn Donnelly, said it would be a travesty if progress was slowed because health professionals had to perform administrative tasks associated with the vaccine roll-out.
Fórsa’s head of health, Éamonn Donnelly, said it would be a travesty if progress was slowed because health professionals had to perform administrative tasks associated with the vaccine roll-out.

The HSE has been urged to immediately start recruiting temporary administrative staff to support the mass roll-out of Covid-19 vaccinations from the end of this month. Fórsa said it would be willing to temporarily set aside normal recruitment practices to ensure that health professionals had the back-up they need to administer vaccines at the fastest possible rate.

 

At a meeting with HSE management yesterday (14th January), Fórsa’s head of health, Éamonn Donnelly, said it would be a travesty if progress was slowed because health professionals had to perform administrative tasks associated with the vaccine roll-out.

 

It said a mix of experienced clerical and admin staff from within the HSE and from outside agencies should be mobilised now to ensure that vaccinators had the support they need as soon as the mass vaccination programme is ready to roll.

 

The union made its move on foot of reports of teething problems with the IT system in place to support the vaccination programme. Mr Donnelly said he believed the public service-wide approach to cross-sectoral redeployments – which was put in place at the outset of the pandemic last year – might be too slow to meet the task in the most effective way.

 

Donnelly said Fórsa had asked to see the HSE’s workforce plan for the initial and wider roll-out of the vaccine, which is expected to accelerate in the coming weeks.

 

“IT problems mean the HSE is currently depending on manual admin systems. But, in any case, the roll-out of vaccines on the scale envisaged will require substantial admin support to avoid vaccinators having to do paperwork.

 

“There is limited in-house availability because of the number of Covid cases in our hospitals, and the fact that many more standard health services are being delivered than was the case in the early part of the Covid emergency.

 

“We have an agreed redeployment policy in place, and this allows for normal recruitment procedures to be temporarily set aside in a ‘break glass’ situation. I believe we’re in that situation now,” he said.

 

The union spoke out after health minister Stephen Donnelly told TDs that up to four million people could be vaccinated against Covid-19 by the end of September. He outlined plans to vaccinate 700,000 people by the end of March, and said Ireland expected to receive 3.7 million doses between April and July, and a further 3.8 million between July and the end of September.

 

This would allow up to four million people get the two-dose vaccine by the end of September.

 

The HSE said yesterday that over 77,300 Covid vaccines have so far been administered. Almost 69,500 have gone to healthcare workers and almost 8,000 were received by people in long-term care facilities.

 

Ireland has so far received over 152,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 3,600 doses of the Moderna vaccine.

 

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