Darkest days of pandemic have passed, says Donnelly

The darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic have now passed, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has said.

He said in a few months he hoped the Government would be in a position to take stock and put in place “appropriate measures” to recognise the contributions made by healthcare staff over the last year or so.

Addressing the Fórsa trade union's health division conference on Wednesday he said its members had provided exceptional service in working through the night and weekends following the cyber attack on the HSE to ensure that all staff were paid as well as in managing the vaccination programme.

Fórsa represents health and social care professional staff as well as managerial and administrative grades in the health service.

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Mr Donnelly said significant numbers of additional staff had been recruited in both these areas on foot of the Government decision last year to boost the health service workforce.

“In the 12 months to March 2021 alone, almost 8,000 more staff have been added to the public health service, including over 1,200 health and social care professionals and over 1,300 management and administrative roles. We also plan to maximise the recruitment of healthcare graduates in 2021. These valuable and valued additional staff have helped the health service meet the challenges posed and will continue to help the country as we enter, hopefully, the final phase of this dreadful pandemic.”

Mr Donnelly said he was hopeful “that within a few months from today, our vaccine rollout will bring us to a place where we will be able to look back at the pandemic, to take stock of healthcare workers’ huge contributions, and to put in place appropriate measures to recognise these”.

The Minister told the conference that essential to delivering the Government’s plans for universal healthcare would be “the shift of services”.

“We must and are working to move care out of acute hospitals into the community and closer to people’s homes”, he said.

He said enhanced community care workstreams would “ensure maximum impact for people in avoiding hospital admission as far as possible”.

He said the Government planned to establish 96 community healthcare networks to enable integrated care and would be recruiting up to 7,000 community-based healthcare staff.

The head of Fórsa’s health division Éamonn Donnelly said the union’s members would be at the forefront of a new community-led health model. He said, quite simply, it could not be achieved without them.

He urged the Government to appoint a health and social care professional policy advisor in the Department of Health and said his members "cannot accept anything less".

He said the Sláintecare reform programme needed to be the model that provided people with the right care, in the right place and at the right time with the least level of complexity. He said it could not be “just another re-structuring”.

Mr Donnelly said the health service was not “bloated with managers” as its critics sometimes argued.

He said these very same managers at the onset of the pandemic worked 70 or 80 hours per week every week without access to compensatory rest.

Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan said he had told the Taoiseach and other Ministers that the most fitting tribute to the efforts of healthcare workers during the pandemic "would be a determination to fix the two-tier nature of our health system once and for all and to invest in developing a universal, state of-the-art service second to none".

“For too long successive Governments have fudged this fundamental duty to citizens. Their dithering and dodging has resulted in a hybrid mix of public and private health care where a small elite become quite wealthy and the public system suffers due to the consequent deficiencies in planning and investment.”