The Health Service has published its National Service Plan 2024 which lists cost saving, improved access to emergency care, and more disability supports as major priorities.
Officials plan to reduce the use of agency staff by one third, and employ another third as full time staff - potentially saving up to 330 million euro.
HSE CEO Bernard Gloster acknowledges the organisation enabled the growth of the use of agency staff:
"The issue with agency and overtime coming out of the pandemic because of pressures in previous years with recruiting and delays with recruiting. the organisation developed a dependency on agency staffing, which simply was not sustainable. We had a budget provision of about 400 million and last year we were looking at spending about a billion so we're about two thirds off the mark with that"
