Sinn Féin spokesperson on Health, David Cullinane TD, has backed the ongoing ballot by health sector trade unions over the unsafe and disastrous “Pay and Numbers Strategy” implemented by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

He called this “a recruitment embargo by another name.”

The TD and candidate for Waterford said that workers are right to demand a safe workforce plan, and that Sinn Féin has proposed a five-year plan which includes recruitment of 40,000 additional healthcare workers and a doubling of undergraduate places over the next term of Government.

He added that many frontline services are grappling with understaffing leading to excessive use of overtime as well as inefficient agency staffing.

David Cullinane said:

“The ongoing recruitment embargo by another name – the Pay and Numbers Strategy – has been a disaster for many frontline health services.

“Workers are right to demand a safe workforce plan and a safe working environment. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have mismanaged the health service, and are punishing frontline workers for their failure to get health spending under control. Workers are right to resist this.

“Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have overseen an astronomical rise in the cost of agency staffing and outsourcing, which is more costly than the HSE delivering services directly. They have allowed and driven on the privatisation of healthcare by stealth.

“They have failed to introduce cost-effective reforms in primary care, community care, and digital transformation. These are political failures and do not justify the reckless stop-start approach to recruitment which is driving healthcare workers into the private sector and abroad.

“We train some of the best healthcare workers in the world, yet there are thousands of health and social care graduates left waiting months on panels for jobs with the HSE, after the State spending years and thousands of euros training them. They want to work in the public system, but are being told to wait until January to see if maybe then they might get a job offer. That is not right.

“Sinn Féin would implement a comprehensive five-year workforce plan to deliver safe staffing and reform. We would give a job guarantee to our health and social care graduates. We would double undergraduate training places over a term of government.

“Sinn Féin is committed to building up our public health service, as well as tackling the wasteful and inefficient spending that makes people, including our healthcare workers, angry. Frontline workers are not to blame.”