Independent Ireland TD for Cork North-Central, Ken O’Flynn, has said that the HSE is increasingly dependent on overseas recruitment amid deepening workforce pressures.
O’Flynn said that new information provided to him through Parliamentary Questions confirms the Health Service Executive is becoming increasingly dependent on overseas recruitment to sustain Ireland’s healthcare workforce, despite staffing numbers rising significantly in recent years.
The HSE confirmed to Deputy O’Flynn that its workforce has increased from approximately 126,000 whole-time equivalent staff in 2020 to more than 153,600 in 2026, yet the health service still faces severe recruitment pressures because “demand outstrips supply.”
The HSE also acknowledged that approximately 1,748 additional nurses and midwives must be added every year simply to maintain existing staffing levels.
Reacting to the figures, Deputy O’Flynn said, “International healthcare workers make an enormous contribution to Ireland and are deeply valued across our health service. The issue here is not international recruitment itself. The issue is whether the State has become structurally dependent on overseas recruitment because we are failing to properly retain and sustain our own workforce.
The HSE has now openly admitted that even after adding more than 27,000 staff since 2020, the system still faces major workforce shortages and demand continues to outstrip supply. That should concern everybody,” he said.
The HSE confirmed it is actively targeting overseas markets and Irish healthcare graduates abroad through initiatives including “Project Home”, international relocation packages, and dedicated recruitment engagement with nursing and midwifery students in the United Kingdom.
Deputy O’Flynn said the Government must now answer serious questions about long-term workforce sustainability, retention, burnout, emigration of Irish-trained professionals, and growing dependence on international recruitment pipelines, saying that “honesty” from the Government about the scale of the workforce crisis facing the health service.
O Flynn also raised concerns over the number of Irish-trained healthcare workers leaving the State and how many are choosing to stay at home.
He also called for information to be shared on “the cost of international recruitment campaigns and relocation incentives” and the possible effects if such recruitment “slows”, saying these are “fundamental strategic questions for the future of our health system.”
The TD says he has now submitted further Parliamentary Questions seeking detailed information on:
As the Sunday Independent featured in February, “Nearly 7,000 Irish medical professionals are now registered to work in Australia, sparking concerns about the impact on the Irish health service as the number seeking a better working life down under has risen by 86pc in six years.
New figures from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) show that 6,959 Irish medical professionals were registered in Australia last year, including dentists, midwives, pharmacists and psychologists.
This has jumped from 3,735 Irish healthcare workers registered there in 2019,” it said.
As Niamh Uí Bhriain wrote on Gript, The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) warned that the recruitment freeze lead to doctors “emigrating in increasing numbers”, while back as far as 2010, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) was rightly complaining that the UK’s National Health Service was recruiting “whole classes of graduating nurses” from Ireland because the state was then also implementing a recruitment embargo.
Most of the 1,600 nurses and midwives graduating in 2010 from Irish universities would emigrate, the INMO estimated, even though some 12,000 nurses from the Philippines, India and elsewhere had been recruited by the health service since 2001 to work in Ireland – at an estimated cost of recruitment of more than €7,500 a head.
One Irish nurse who was interviewed said that only 10% of those who had trained and qualified with her stayed in Ireland – adding that, despite having “what society considers ‘good jobs’”, it was almost impossible “to save for a mortgage or have any quality of life in Ireland”.
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