The former deputy CEO of Ryanair, Michael Cawley, is set to join the board of the Health Service Executive (HSE), following an appointment by Health Minister Stephen Donnelly. Cawley, who embarks upon one of the two new roles that the board intends to fill, brings with him a commendable record of enhancing efficiency and productivity, attributes highly sought after by Minister Donnelly.
Cawley boasts an extensive 16-year career at the airlines where he climbed up the ladder from the position of CFO in 1997 to deputy CEO in 2003. He exited the airlines almost ten years ago and has since then been involved in various business ventures.
Cawley parted ways with his role as the chairman of the state tourism board in 2020 following allegations of him vacationing in Italy during a period when Fáilte Ireland was endorsing local holidays and the government was counselling against non-essential travel, without any legal implications.
Recently, Donnelly has been emphasising the urgency for improved productivity within the healthcare sector in light of considerable augmentations in funding and staffing over the past years.
A report published earlier this year, drafted by the Irish Government Economic Evaluation Service and the Department of Health, highlighted a disparity between the monies and workforce deployed, in contrast to the growth in either separate activity metrics or aggregate activities, calculated by summing up inpatients, outpatients, day cases and emergency attendances and allocating the unit costs for each area.
The report discovered a significant discrepancy, indicating that the composite activity growth between 2016 and 2022 was either negative, behind workforce growth by two times, and lagging behind actual expenditure growth by thrice over the same duration.
Furthermore, Donnelly observed in an interview that the increase in the patient numbers treated within the health service hadn’t proportionately matched the level of resources that the exchequer had invested.