Mr. Martin Jennings:

I am a physiotherapist manager working in the HSE and chairperson of our national professional committee, so I know more physiotherapy matters, but I know many of the physiotherapy issues are replicated right across our other HSCP services therapy grades. We do not have exact data. I have anecdotal stuff and I also have my own view. The amount of communication I started to receive in my role as chair of the national professional committee in the past 18 months from all grades has ballooned. These people are having major difficulties. They do not see a future in working in their profession, which they like. They do not see an end in sight to the ever-increasing demands. Some of the development posts arrived but some for key areas did not get over the line.

It got worse in recent times. A manager in the south east – one of the many items of correspondence I got – reported that they lost established posts that provided essential services for years that just happen to be empty. That is from a member in the south east. There was an increase in development posts in the years leading up to 2023, from a period where there was very little activity or very few development posts coming on. They kind of turned on at the same time, and many of them are focused on specialist areas such as community cardiology, respiratory services, people with chronic lung disease, diabetes and older person services in ICPOP. Some of those services were filled and some were not. What happened is there was movement. The same staff members from existing established services moved into some of the more development posts. Our members reported to us that while recruitment was ongoing, there was not enough time to be able to fill the vacancies they left in established posts. It was just the luck of the draw, depending on which area you were in and which network or hospital. When the music stopped, you could have been in a bad place or had only a smaller number of vacancies.

Morale is on the floor. People find it hard to get their head around the fact we got these development posts pre-Covid. From a physiotherapy perspective – I am sure the same but I do not have data for the other HSCPs – we were 30% below the European average for physiotherapists in 2018. We got some development posts but we needed that longer period of time. We needed a lead-in period n order to translate from universities to entry-level staff grades, physiotherapists getting their training, building up their expertise and specialties. It was going to take a couple years for that to transfer into filling the newer development posts. Now, when we have expanded and added some additional places in our undergraduate programmes, in many areas right across the country, those entry level posts are not available.