Wednesday 27th August 2014. The Irish Medical Organisation has warned that the HSE is “not serious” about tackling the recruitment crisis for Consultants in the Irish health services. The comments were made by Steve Tweed, Director of Industrial Relations at the IMO who was speaking following the collapse of talks at the LRC aimed at helping the HSE to recruit and retain Irish trained doctors in hospitals in Ireland.

Speaking today, Mr. Tweed said that Irish trained doctors were queuing up to leave the Irish health services but the HSE was acting as if the queues were coming the other way; “there’s a complete contradiction between the HSE approach and the facts on the ground where we have a health service that is dangerously understaffed at specialist level. This is a crisis and the HSE seem to think that they can ignore the extraordinary demand that exists internationally for Irish trained doctors and simply carry on putting forward proposals that will not solve the problem. The reality is that our doctors see better jobs with better pay and better conditions in various markets across the world and they are voting with their feet.”

Mr. Tweed said the IMO would be prepared to re-engage in talks with the HSE if they could demonstrate that they were prepared to work with the IMO to tackle the problem; “we want to create a health service which serves the needs of patients and the wider community. We believe we can help the HSE tackle this recruitment crisis but we need them to engage seriously and constructively with us on this critical agenda. They are not doing that now.”

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