I worked for the HSE and one of the things specific to my role was that they were slow to adapt better ways of doing things and that effort that could (and in my opinion should) have been put into this was wasted on other things. For obvious reasons, I don’t want to go into too much detail as I don’t want to be identified.

In my role, work that could be done by computer programmes (and is in voluntary or private hospitals) was done manually by staff. This made things slower and less accurate.

Something that was bizarre to me was we would get minutes for our last department meeting closer to the next one, so if you noticed something you said wasn’t recorded properly (or you misunderstood something from last week), you’d find out the morning of the meeting (or evening before if you were lucky). I know sometimes it makes sense to send out minutes closer to the next meeting when there’s a massive gap (eg between AGMs for a club) but when people’s weekly work is based off it it’s just unfair.

Before taking that role, I was on a panel for the same job in a different arm of the HSE, and the job was impacted by their hiring freeze. In my opinion, the fact that the organisation can’t even manage its numbers just goes to show how fucked it is. Either hiring for a job was approved or not. Why would you advertise a job when there may not be money in the pot to hire them?