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HSE needs ‘a Michael O’Leary’
November 24, 2015 by Lloyd Mudiwa
L-r: Mr Declan J Magee, RCSI President; and Michael O’Leary, Chief Executive of Ryanair who gave the 24th Carmichael Lecture as part of the RCSI Millin Meeting
Ryanair’s CEO concurs with the view of some critics of the HSE that the Executive needs ‘Michael O’Leary-type strong management’, and true to his mantra, blames politicians and trade unions for the poor state of the Irish health service.
“Yeah, it does,” O’Leary returned, even as this reporter was still posing the question.
This followed the entrepreneur’s well received 24th Carmichael Lecture, entitled ‘Ryanair, Always Getting Better’, which is given by an outstanding individual nominated by RCSI’s President from outside the medical profession, as part of the 36th RCSI Millin Meeting on Friday last week.
O’Leary told a full-capacity lecture theatre in the RCSI that: “Like most people in this room, I think the HSE needs a complete and total revolution.”
“Nothing will succeed in this country if it’s run by politicians. What’s ultimately wrong with the health system in this country is that the Government is trying to run it,” he charged.
“There is no effective management within the health service because ultimately the unions, who are effectively running the show, and running it particularly badly, will bypass management every time they are unhappy and meet with the Minister for Health. I don’t know why there is a Minister for Health?”
Governments, O’Leary claimed, should create health policy and were “absolutely useless” at implementing and delivering services as in other sectors.
He noted there was “flopping around” between the regional and national HSE, “and by the way nobody can lose their jobs”.
“So, every time you create a new administration there’s a whole new lot of bureaucrats, sitting on top of the last lot of bureaucrats, and none of the bureaucrats do anything or can do anything because the unions, when they are unhappy, will go straight to the Government and the Government has no power to tell the unions to go away themselves!,” O’Leary commented.
“Unlike the American system, (President Franklin) Roosevelt was the one in the 1930s who said ‘if you are a public sector employee the government can’t control your labour so you can’t go on strike’. Now you can’t propose that in Europe because it’s almost down there with paedophilia or something like that…. .
“They should have binding arbitration. They should have dispute resolution mechanisms, but they should never, ever, ever be allowed to withdraw their labour or if they do, the Government should sack them and you would solve most of the public sector problems we have in this country.”
Likening the health service to an airline (“It’s a huge and very expensive infrastructure provider”), O’Leary claimed in Ireland it was run for the benefit of the producers.
“Thus, you will have people, and it could be nurses all the way up to surgeons, who would work between the hours of 9am until 6pm, and then they are gone weekends,” he commented.
“Everybody should be working on seven-day rosters. Everybody should be working on shifts. That’s what we do with our pilots and cabin crew.”
He added: “Ultimately it’s about production. How you increase the level of outputs. How you keep hospital theatres full seven days a week. They are very expensive pieces of kit, like aircrafts, they should be full seven days a week running operations 24 hours a day. But it will never be structured that way as long as it is run by politicians and the unions can influence the politicians and the politicians are unable to manage the unions.”