Irish Examiner View: Preposterous bureaucracy tying up vaccination programme in red tape – Irish Examiner

One of the constant challenges of our world is trying to find a sensible balance between the red tape so beloved of stickler bureaucrats and efficiency. Maybe balancing the demands of political correctness and commonsense too. This must be done without losing sight of the positive, empowering objectives behind those disciplines. Those objectives are not always achieved and efforts to fight the pandemic have uncovered one as bizarre as it is distressing.

A former surgeon but still registered with the Medical Council was asked to supply, among many other documents, her birth certificate and Junior Certificate results when she applied to become a Covid-19 vaccinator. The recruitment system, inexplicably farmed out by the HSE to a recruitment agency, is so tangled in red tape that it has been extended a fourth time because it is so complex. The system has also been criticised because it does not facilitate those only able to work on a part-time basis.

It is all too easy, and tempting too, to scoff at this disabling level of box-ticking and self-important fussing but we are in the middle of a highly infectious pandemic and our efforts to fight it are not always as reassuring as they might be. A way to quickly employ those properly qualified and capable of giving an injection hardly rocket science must be found immediately.

Another post-pandemic chore has been identified by this silliness let's define the cost, in lives and money, of overweening bureaucracy in our health system so it can be greatly reduced.

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Irish Examiner View: Preposterous bureaucracy tying up vaccination programme in red tape - Irish Examiner