Health ministry denies hiring freeze at RHAs

The Min­istry of Health says it is not aware of any pol­i­cy di­rec­tives is­sued by the Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties (RHAs) to cease hir­ing or to ar­bi­trar­i­ly ter­mi­nate staff con­tracts.

In a state­ment on Tues­day af­ter­noon, the min­istry said in the ab­sence of ap­point­ed Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty Boards, the Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cers un­der the over­sight of the Min­istry of Health con­tin­ue to man­age hu­man re­source mat­ters.

This in­cludes en­sur­ing that staffing lev­els re­main aligned with the ser­vice de­liv­ery goals of each in­sti­tu­tion, while al­so op­er­at­ing with­in their fi­nan­cial re­al­i­ties.

"This pru­dent over­sight is es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant in light of the RHAs’ col­lec­tive re­quest for ap­prox­i­mate­ly $400 mil­lion in ad­di­tion­al fund­ing to ad­dress aged payables, sub­mit­ted for the Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view," the state­ment added.

The min­istry says it has main­tained on­go­ing di­a­logue with the RHAs to en­sure op­er­a­tional con­ti­nu­ity, in­clud­ing the con­tin­u­a­tion of new hires and con­tract re­newals, pend­ing the ap­point­ment of the RHA Boards.