St Vincent de Paul Residence for the elderly has a “limited and inadequate” number of nurses allocated to it, the home’s management said in response to criticism over a mounting overtime bill.
The state-funded residence was found by the National Audit Office to have spent an average of €197,000 a month on overtime in 2019.
The audit revealed a lack of monitoring and control on overtime, especially in those instances where members of staff habitually took sick leave immediately after doing overtime. A high accumulation of balances of time off in lieu was also noted.
According to the NAO’s report, the top 12 employees with the highest overtime payments – together accumulating €283,991 – received overtime payments ranging between 75 per cent and 161 per cent of their basic salary.
The auditors deemed this to be “very considerable”.
One employee, a nurse, was found to have been paid €29,804 in overtime, over one-and-a-half times the person’s basic salary of €18,557.
Testing by the NAO revealed that seven employees, who were among the top 12 overtime earners in the sample selected, each took on average more than 26 days of sick leave in 2019.
Nurses in audit sample worked shifts of 13.5 hours at a stretch
In a number of instances, the sick leave was taken a day after performing overtime. The NAO said that this often led to the person on sick leave being replaced to keep the staff complement ratio stable, further increasing overtime expense.
Two of the four nurses in the audit sample worked shifts of 13.5 hours at a stretch, likely contributing to excessive tiredness, the NAO said.
It also flagged how, according to the public service management code, overtime work should be resorted to “only in exceptional circumstances”.
The code states that overtime is regulated by the permanent secretary responsible for the government entity in question, yet, the residence did not seek approval and there was no evidence of authority having been delegated to its CEO.
In response to the NAO’s findings, the management said the country’s ageing population was putting elderly care providers under stress to find the necessary human resources to meet demand for nursing and care services.
In the prevailing conditions, it said overtime was “inevitable” to enable staff to cope.
It added that any capping of overtime would lead to a deterioration of the situation and make it “practically unmanageable”, besides inflating, not reducing, the overtime bill.
For various reasons, recruitment of more staff remained a stumbling block.
“The number of nurses allocated to SVPR is limited and inadequate. Management has to make do with the staff complement at its disposal,” the home’s management told the NAO.