Category Archives: Candidates

Jackie Brown Medical are nominated 3 times!

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NRF Awards Ceremony

NRF Awards night

Jackie Brown Medical were nominated 3 times on the Annual National Recruitment Federation Awards Ceremony last Friday @ the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin.

The 3 nominations were -

  1. Agency of the Year
  2. Best in Sector – Medical and Healthcare
  3. Best Online Service for our fantastic new website and online presence.

The Team here are very proud to have been nominated so many times and we wish to thank our Client Companies and our Job Seekers for remaining our inspiration for striving to be the Best Medical Recruitment Agency in Ireland.

 

Our Midwives do us proud

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Our Midwives do us proud

Safe in the hands of our Midwives

According to the Medical Independent, a major study has found that midwifery-led care is as safe as consultant-led care but uses less intervention in pregnancy and childbirth.

The study, commissioned by the HSE and conducted by the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin, involved 1,653 women having babies in the HSE Dublin North-East region from 2004 to 2007, and compared the usual consultant-led maternity care with a new model of care provided by midwives in two integrated Midwifery-led Units (MLUs) in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda and Cavan General Hospital.

The number of babies needing resuscitation at birth, or admission to the special care baby unit, was the same in both groups. Almost 6 in 10 women in the CLUs (57 per cent) had their labours speeded up by either having their ‘waters’ broken or having oxytocin, given intravenously by ‘drip’, compared with only 4 in 10 women in the MLUs (40 per cent).

In labour, fewer women in the MLU group chose to have epidurals (18 per cent) than did those in the CLU (24 per cent).

A signficant 85 per cent of women attending the MLUs said they would recommend the care they had received to a friend, compared with 70 per cent of those having usual care. Although facilities in the MLUs were quite luxurious, the cost of care for each woman was €332.80 less than in the usual hospital system. In addition, this model of care enabled consultant obstetricians to devote more time to caring for women with pregnancy complications, who really need their input.

Cecily Begley, Professor of Midwifery in Trinity College Dublin and principal investigator of the project said the results demonstrated the high quality of maternity care in this country. “Safety is our primary concern”, she said, “and this study has shown conclusively that low-risk women receive safe care from both midwives and obstetricians. Midwifery-led care uses fewer interventions, however, and most women prefer that”.

The study has been published in the journal BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth

Letter from HSE requesting a stop on Locum Doctor Recruitment

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A&E Locum recruitment stopped

A&E Locum recruitment stopped

Hospitals across the country have received a letter from the HSE stipulating that they must stop recruiting locums to fill vacancies in emergency medicine, according to the Irish Medical News (IMN)

However, a senior consultant in emergency medicine has questioned the HSE’s contention that the recent recruitment drive in India and Pakistan has “solved” the need for locum cover in emergency departments (EDs). It is understood that the memo, sent by Ms Laverne McGuinness, the HSE’s National Director of Performance and Financial Management, on October 25, has caused particular issues at University Hospital Limerick where there has been an ongoing shortage of middle grade doctors to staff its ED. Dr Fergal Hickey, former president of the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine (IAEM) and a consultant in emergency medicine at Sligo General Hospital, told IMN that due to the recruitment drive for doctors from India and Pakistan, the HSE believes “there is now no need for locum cover”.

According to Dr Hickey, vacancies in EDs are mainly at registrar grade, however, he said that the HSE “seems to believe that very junior, very inexperienced doctors from India and Pakistan recruitment schemes” are adequate to fill these vacancies or that doctors can be arbitrarily transferred from other services. The HSE responded saying that “significant savings” can be made by filling posts that are currently filled by locums with doctors recruited through the drive in India and Pakistan. However, Dr Hickey contended that there is “a clear lack of understanding at senior management level in the HSE about where the vacancies in emergency medicine are and the calibre of doctors required to fill these vacancies”. “Our main vacancies are at middle grade whereas the available doctors from this particular recruitment drive are at a more junior level, so the problem will continue,” he said. Dr Hickey said that HSE management “think that they have solved the recruitment crisis, which clearly they haven’t”.

Dr Hickey said that neither the HSE nor the Department of Health understands the mismatch between existing vacancies and the doctors who have been recruited from India and Pakistan, who do not have “the experience or expertise” necessary. The HSE told IMN that doctors recruited in India and Pakistan are highly qualified and experienced and “are particularly well suited to working in the Irish health system” as they train in the same system used in Ireland. According to Dr Hickey, this is a “naive” perception. “A middle grade doctor working in the ED might have three or four years experience in the Irish healthcare system, and a year or more in an ED,” he explained. “And they’re seeking naively to replace those with people who have just literally arrived in the country.”

Jackie Brown Medical launches new website!

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Alert!We have just celebrated our 4th Birthday @ Jackie Brown Medical and have given the Business a Birthday present of a fresh and fabulous new website which it deserved!

We now have movement, interraction and life on our site.

We have a Social Media aspect

We have used our job seekers and Clients comments and input in to the content and design.

We have kept the same high standard of Compliance and made it very user friendly.

As the business grows, we learn more and have more to give to you, our readers.

We have features such as our Advice Centre which gives solid advice around interviews, CV layout and Medical Sales which remains one of our Specialist sectors across Medical Recruitment.

We are very excited about it and will watch over the coming months it’s performance with Google and it’s bots!

In 2008 and 2009 we were short listed for ‘Best Online Service’ @ the National Recruitment Federation Awards and we are now aiming for the overall winner.

We couldn’t have done it without you, our readers, so please do keep your comments and feedback coming as it is very important to us to remain on top of our game.

 

Reason for Leaving

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CV writing

CV writing

One of the most common questions Employers ask when they see a job seekers Curriculum Vitae (CV) is their reason for leaving their current or last job.

We advise regularly on CV writing to our job seekers and this is an area we cannot emphasise enough.

It is essential on your CV as a job seeker to clearly state your reason for leaving each job.

This can be done in one line at the end of each job and makes it alot easier for an employer to gauge if a job seeker is a ‘hopper’ – someone who leaves jobs after a short time regularly, or a ‘stayer’ – someone who shows commitment and longevity in the work place.

Employers prefer the latter.

It may simply be the case you have had contract positions, or a baby or many of the good reasons to only be in a job a short time, but if you do not state your reasons for leaving on your CV, you are left wide open to the wrong interpretation which may be the difference between an Employer dismissing your CV or not.

As a Medical Recruitment Agency, this also helps us to analyse our job seekers better.

So remember, when submitting your CV to a Recruitment Agency or directly to a Company, always state your reason for leaving after each job.

Poor job – Poor health

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Fed up with your job?

Fed up with your job?

Being in a badly paid job with little or no support can be as bad for your mental health as having no job at all, the results of a new study indicate. (IrishHealth.com)

According to Australian researchers, because being in work is associated with better mental health than unemployment, government policies have tended to focus on the risks posed by joblessness, without necessarily considering the impact the quality of a job may have.

 

They collected data on over 7,000 people of working age. The participants’ mental health was assessed and they were asked about their employment status.

For those who worked, the ‘psychosocial’ quality of their job was graded according to measures related to demands and complexity, level of control and perceived job security. Respondents were also asked if they felt they received fair pay for the work they did.

Not unexpectedly, the study found that those who were unemployed had poorer mental health overall compared to those in work.

However, after taking account of a range of factors with the potential to influence the results, such as educational attainment and marital status, the mental health of those who were jobless was comparable to, or often better than, that of people who worked, but were in poor quality jobs.

Those in the poorest quality jobs experienced the sharpest decline in mental health over time. Furthermore, there was a direct link between the number of unfavourable working conditions experienced and mental health, with each additional adverse condition lowering the mental health score.

The researchers from the Australian National University noted that there is some evidence to show that employment is associated with better physical and mental health and the mental health of those out of work tends to improve when they find a job.

However, in this study, they found that the health benefits of finding a job after a period of unemployment depended on the quality of the post. In other words, job quality predicted mental health.

Getting a high quality job after being unemployed improved mental health by an average of three points, but getting a poor quality job was more detrimental to mental health than remaining unemployed, resulting in a loss of 5.6 points.

The researchers pointed out that paid work confers several benefits, including a defined social role and purpose, friendships and structured time. But jobs which afford little control, are very demanding, or provide little support and reward, are not good for mental health, they insisted.

“Work first policies are based on the notion that any job is better than none as work promotes economic as well as personal wellbeing. Psychosocial job quality is a pivotal factor that needs to be considered in the design and delivery of employment and welfare policy,” the team concluded.

Details of these findings are published in the journal, Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Fine Gael to end Hospital Consultant massive earnings

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Fine Gael Health SpokespersonAccording to the irishhealth.com, Fine Gael’s health spokesperson Dr James Reilly has warned that massive earnings by some hospital consultants would end under the party’s universal health insurance (UHI) plan.

Under both Fine Gael and Labour’s health service plans, everyone in the population would be insured for the same level of health cover and there would be equal access to care in both private and public hospitals for everyone based on medical need alone, with free GP care also being provided for the entire population.

Labour has proposed that €75 million be clawed back from consultant salaries to help pay for free GP care, while Sinn Fein has said consultants’ public salaries should be reduced from the current €180,000 plus to €150,000.

Dr Reilly told a health policy conference in Dublin that the days of consultants taking a large State salary and an even larger private practice payout on top of that, would come to an end under Fine Gael.

“People who are earning €180,000 to €200,000, who have studied for six years to get a good Leaving Cert and then go to medical college for six years, and then train for a further 10 years – I think most people acknowledge that people who have done that have developed an expertise and are entitled to a good income. And I believe €180,000 is a bloody good income.”

“I am saying very clearly that the days of people who think they can take €180,000 out of the State and another €300,000 from the VHI will be over under Fine Gael, because it’s just not sustainable. It may upset some people, but this is a society we live in and no-one can set themselves above the rest of society. We are all taking pain and we will all share in the gain at the other end, and that is the Fine Gael position.”

The conference, attended by representatives of the main political parties, was organised by the Irish Dental Association, Irish Medical Organisation and Irish Pharmacy Union.

Dr Reilly said there was sufficient money being spent on health even with the cutbacks to give us an excellent service. “We just have not been spending the money in the right way.”

He said under the Fine Gael insurance plan healthcare would be run by private operators and there may be some not for profit global insurance operators who might enter the market as well under UHI.

“With the entire community insured we will be doubling the size of the market and that will attract more competition and I believe help control costs.”

Labour’s health spokesperson Jan O’Sullivan told the meeting that we have to reform the health service in order to get better value for money. She said Labour would introduce free GP care at the point of delivery within four years.

She said under Labour’s universal insurance scheme cover would be provided by private health insurers as well as a public health insurer. A public health insurer body would be set up but people would be allowed to keep their private insurance as well.

Both Fine Gael and Labour plan to reinstate the dental scheme for medical card patients, the meeting was told. However, Fine Gael said the funds were not there at the moment to reinstate dental care subsidies for those who pay PRSI, while Labour said it would review the matter.

Fianna Fail health spokesman Barry Andrews said he would challenge Fine Gael to outline what the true cost of universal health insurance would be. He said a couple in the Netherlands in a similar scheme had to pay €5,000 per annum for health cover.

He said he doubted whether the two-tier system would end under UHI , as people would still be able to purchase additional benefits other than those provided under the State-controlled insurance scheme.

Ruadhan MacAodhain of Sinn Fein told the meeting that his party opposed UHI as they saw it as a direct privatisation of the HSE, and the party would limit consultant salaries to €150,000 a year.