100,000 employed in the health service?

P

purple

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I heard on NewsTalk this morning that there are 100,000 people employed in the public health service.
Is this true?
Is one person in every 40 in this country working in the health service?
What proportion of the work force would this be?
How many patients processed per employee per year would that give?

They also said that an extra 350,000,000 euro would be needed next year just to cover pay increases and next year the health budget would be 11 thousand million euro.
As Bertie would say, "Jasus!".

Please tell me that it's not true!
 
Yes it is I believe what they said this morning ... 100,000 people employed in the Health Service ... and it would cost €550m next year to pay them their benchmarking increase (lets not even go there on this discussion !)

Your point about 1 in 40 ... acutally it's higher than that .. I think there are ~1.8m people at work in this country .. so 1 in 18 people work for the Health Service

I've no idea how this compares internationally .. I've no idea how broad the definition used in defining Health service is.

It would be interesting to know how many of those 100,000 are "front line" staff invovled in patient care

One of the interesting questions about health spending for sure is how we've managed to not improve the health service much (if at all) despite spending a load more on it (Not got the statistic to hand but it's something like Health Spending has tripled in the last 10/15 years)
 
Got the statistics from CSO.ie

1997 Health Spending
€3.62bn
2002 Health Spending
€8.29bn
This year it is around €10bn


So more than doubled but less than tripled - figures are nominal not adjusted so I guess you could say doubled in real terms.
 
It seems a believable figure if you include the peripheral services (Home Help, looked-after children, adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse projects, Meals on Wheels). NHS/Social Services/peripheral non-voluntary in UK is currently in excess of 4 million employees (up from just over 1 million in the mid-1970's - a figure which did not include Social Services as Anurin Bevan had "fudged it" in 1948 and in order to push the creation of the NHS through agreed to autonomous structure and funding for S.S.). What do you think is the cause of the exponential increase? Might it be the medicalisation of much of life which formerly was an accepted, nonpathological rite of passage (e.g. older adults. Being old appears now to be considered synonymous with being "ill"!)
 
And thats not all ...

I would say that there are also

- Tens of thousands of people caring for individuals within their own extended families

- Lots of 'private health care' & nursing home type employees not counted in the figues

You young healthy ones dont know the half of what is ahead of you ! :)


eDog
 
Re: And thats not all ...

There may be 100,000 employed in the public health service , but how many of them are WORKING ? I know quite a few of them and they seem to have an easy enough life. Plenty of coffee breaks, plenty of job security, plenty of crack, plenty of holidays, plenty of pension. They should cut their pay so the rest of us pay less tax.
 
Re: And thats not all ...

plenty of crack

I'd say the crack might have something to do with their lack of motivation alright. Highly addictive stuff that.
 
Re: And thats not all ...

I always thought you must have been on something like that, Piggy. The first thought that came in to my head about you is the first thoiught that came in to your head about crack !
 
Re: And thats not all ...

I presume you meant craic then and not

"a purified and potent form of cocaine that is smoked rather than snorted "

I was merely being humurous in pointing out your error. Thanks for the insult though.
 
Re: And thats not all ...

"I presume you meant craic then and not crack"

No Piggy, I spelt it crack all along. Still, it is not the first time you got the wrong end of the stick about something, so dont worry about it.
 
Re: And thats not all ...

No Piggy, I spelt it crack all along

Oh right. You meant to say that they are taking crack then!?
 
Re: And thats not all ...

No Piggy, it was you that said that, not me. See your post of 2.05pm. Please do not accuse me of saying or even suggesting you said yourself. If you cannot understand this, no wonder you cannot comprehend more complex issues , such as Iraq ; let alone form a balanced opinion on same.
 
Re: And thats not all ...

:lol

Rabbit. At the risk of annoying the moderators, perhaps you need to chill out a bit and differentiate between this post and some on Iraq. If you don't agree with my point of view on some other topics then that's fine. I don't mind. No need to be so personal in some other post.

Crack = crack cocaine.
It does not mean having the 'craic'.
You wrote the word as 'crack'.

Like I said, I was only being humourous. Relax.
 
Re: And thats not all ...

I looked up the dictionary and there is no such word as "craic" When I wrote "plenty of crack" I meant plenty of comaradie and fun. My post made other serious points , I would not "joke" or even suggest about the plentyfulness or not of the drug "crack" in the health service. The drug "crack" mas no more relevance to the Irish health service than to any other aspect of Irish life. The drug "Crack", however , is not a joke to those poor members of society who are addicted to it , or to their families.


However, lets shake hands and not get too upset over it.
I am not commenting again on "crack"
 
Re: And thats not all ...

'craic' is Irish for buttocks (esp. the cleavage), so it's no surprise you didn't find it in the dictionary. Unless of course you looked in an Irish langauge dictionary.
 
Re: And thats not all ...

Get back on topic or I'll close the thread. If you want to attack each other, do it by PM or email.
 
100,000???

The real sad thing about the Health Services ..is that they are so spread out and diverse that they need to conduct a census to know how many of them that are actually employed at any one point.

See the Brennan Report if you think this is BS
 
Re: 100,000???

And now 85% of them want to go on strike rather than improve things. Impact say it's because of fears about job security yet everyone knows it is next to impossible to sack a civil servant. With over half a billion in pay rises they are still not happy. Do none of them live in the real world?
With all the extra money and resources the service does not work. I do not accept that it's because there are 100,000 wasters in the health service so if that's not the reason then it must be structural, so why so much resistance to improving the structure?
 
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