The HSE People Strategy for 2025 to 2027 says it sets out a clear path to deliver meaningful improvements in staff engagement and experiences, in support of delivering better health outcomes for service users.
“While the timeline of the plan is three years, our ambitions are over a longer term. We want to meet the current challenges we face, including workforce planning, delivering on recruitment, retention, development and deployment targets, to achieve planned service expansion and infrastructure developments. This will enable and support our new organisation structures to fully deliver transformative, future focused services.
“However, we also want to set the conditions for wider change that will have lasting benefits as these new structures deliver a modern, value-based health and social care system. This transformed system will be capable of delivering on the vision of Sláintecare, where everyone has equitable access to services based on need.
“Central to this is the strengthening of partnerships with our staff, regional and central management, trade unions and staff representative associations and Government. The HSE in engaging with the various health sector unions aims to foster constructive dialogue, enhance workplace relations, and address issues affecting employees within the organisation in a cooperative manner.”
The HSE said its long-established independently chaired national joint council and the joint information and consultation forum would be enhanced by joint union and management forums in each of the regions. The HSE would continue to work with the health sector unions in advancing the priorities of the health sector and implementing the Public Sector Agreement 2024-2026 and its successor agreement. “Our other key stakeholders are our patients and service users, our communities and voluntary organisations. Collectively, our focus will be on empowering our people to engage, collaborate and innovate in consultation with these and all stakeholders to achieve the commitments within this strategy.
“This strategy will be translated into more specific actions in local business and operational plans, containing more detail on specific areas of focus, targets and measures to achieve success. Regional business plans will also provide detail on how priority actions will be progressed, while ensuring a local response to distinct needs within specific areas.
“This will be achieved with support from the centre. Engagement with staff groups, representative bodies and relevant stakeholders will take place on an ongoing basis to take account of progress and seek feedback necessary for policies and any proposed initiatives.
“The HR senior leadership team will be responsible for coordinating and agreeing all people policies, measuring and monitoring our success and ensuring that regular and timely review of our strategy takes place. This will occur in conjunction with the outputs from our biennial staff survey, which will help us adjust and refine how we are doing things over the lifetime of the HSE People Strategy 2025 and beyond. This will assist us to achieve our ambitions and overall strategic goal of ‘enabling our people to deliver’.
“To ensure strategy success, we will monitor and measure effectiveness in a number of ways relevant to each commitment. Our HR team will support and collaborate with operational managers and regional people leaders, ensuring key performance indicators are identified and matched to agreed standards. Success in delivering our commitments will be assessed on an ongoing basis with oversight from the HSE Board. This will support progress evaluation and adjustment of approach to achieve performance goals. During times of change implementation, there are challenges to delivering on strategic goals. However, there are also many opportunities. This strategy strives to optimise the change required to accelerate progress towards a better health and social care system for all – service users and staff.
The HSE has made a number of commitments in the Strategy.
Workforce Planning
- Ensure that the HSE WTE remains within approved limits (2025 WTE – 148,500)
Enabling data insights
- Introduce systems of self-service technology regionally, providing real time data. Continue the implementation of the National Staff Integrated Payroll System to Section 38 Organisations, building on the successful completion within HSE statutory services in 2025.
Maximising opportunities
- Continually modernise its recruitment service. Advance procurement of a Talent Acquisition System to deliver a modernised and accessible recruitment and engagement service. Improve the recruitment time to hire.
- Work to increase the availability of undergraduate and postgraduate healthcare places.
- Retaining our workforce
Focus on staff retention
- Support work-life balance, through flexible working options, where feasible.
- Stabilise or reduce the turnover rate and continue local initiatives to reduce the number of ‘difficult to fill’ posts.
Induction and leadership
- Assess the type and method of induction and leadership programmes delivered.
- Increase the number of programmes delivered and the measurable outcomes achieved.
Leadership management
- Examine the suite of leadership programmes and initiatives currently provided.
- Develop and expand the suite of leadership programmes to support healthcare growth and transformation.
Service transformation
- Examine opportunities to enable demonstrable expansion of services across 7 days.
- Enable staff to maximise patient flow, reduce patient time in hospital, and speed up access to care.
- Enhance asset management.
- Re-direct access to alternative community services when appropriate.
Consultant Expertise
- Support mechanisms to ensure consultant expertise is available to enable service delivery.
- Enable all staff to provide care in the right place at the right time.
Diversity, equality and inclusion
- Continue the HSE strategy of diversity, equality and inclusion in the workplace and develop and implement a new diversity, equality and inclusion strategy.
Employment targets
- Review its approach to identifying staff declaring a disability and the Public Service employment target of people with disabilities.
- Continue to identify and support the proportion of staff declaring a disability. Continue on a phased approach to achieve the 6% employment target of people with disabilities for the Public Service.
Workplace culture
- Review progress on workplace culture, health and wellbeing and recognition.
- Continue the positive progress tracked for workplace culture, health and wellbeing and recognition, evidenced by findings in the Staff Surveys 2023, 2025 and 2027.
Staff engagement
- Promote greater staff engagement to achieve improvement in areas such as incident reporting, performance achievement and decision making.
- Demonstrate continued improvement in incident reporting.
- Achieve greater participation in the performance achievement process.
- Increase staff involvement in decision making, based on feedback and findings in Staff Surveys.
Staff attendance
- Focus on factors impacting staff attendance
- Improve staff attendance and absence rates (2024 total absence rate 6.19%, averaged across all staff groups).
Dignity at work
- Continue to raise awareness and monitor dignity in the workplace.
- Reduce the number of formal dignity at work cases.
Employee wellbeing
- Review HSE employee assistance programmes for quality and effectiveness.
- Monitor employee assistance programme counselling interventions for quality and effectiveness outcomes.
Staff incidents
- Review the management of incidents impacting staff safety and work-related ill-health.
- Reduce the number of days lost due to staff safety incidents and work-related ill health and aim to decrease the cost of related claims.
- Focus on feedback and outputs from the ‘Your Opinion Counts’ Staff Survey.
- Implement actions from the Staff Survey at regional and national level.
Change and innovation
- Continue to champion change and innovation in the HSE.
- Support and monitor opportunities initiated regionally and nationally for change and innovation.
Staff performance
- Actively promote the staff performance achievement process.
- Increase participation in the staff performance achievement process from the current baseline (2024 – 10.5%).
Service transformation
- Engage and collaborate to ensure the HSE is adapting to meet service need.
- Implement a 5/7 work pattern, in line with the Public Service Agreement and Public Only Consultant Contract.
- Enable delivery of a range of routine services on a 7/7 basis.
