🏥 Addressing the health workforce crisis calls for a radical shift in planning and forecasting models. A new Viewpoint in the European Journal of Public Health looks at what adaptive, dynamic planning means. 📖 academic.oup.com/eurpub/artic... 📺 Watch the related webinar: youtu.be/m2CTdpZeleY?... ⬇️

Peter Boylan ‘Our National Clinical Practice Guidelines on Labour should be revised by the HSE without delay. We must not see the problems experienced in Nottingham becoming embedded in obstetric practice here’ www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...

Nice summary RTÉ News: Wide variation in take-up of public-only consultant contract - data www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

NEW: The story behind a silencing. Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn Williams is trapped in a parallel private justice system. I've written about what it tells us about the "post-state" future, a cryptolibertarian dream that's close than we realise. open.substack.com/pub/broligar...

RTÉ News: Quarter of work in Galway public lab from private hospital, Dáil told www.rte.ie/news/politic...

'A private company run by medical consultants at Beaumont received contracts from the public hospital to the value of about €6.2 million over a six-year period from 2019 outside of any public procurement process, an Oireachtas committee has been told' www.irishtimes.com/politics/oir...

Beaumont hospital paid a radiology firm €6.2 million over six years without following any formal procurement process, TDs have heard. www.imt.ie/news/e6-2-mi...

Just out Immigration and the NHS: the evidence www.health.org.uk/reports-and-...

‘A “culture of silence” meant dozens of senior staff at Nottingham refused to co-operate with the review, the department said’

CAHMS whistleblower, Dr Sharma: 'does not regret speaking out. She said parents of the children impacted by the Camhs situation in Kerry have provided “constant support”. “I’m alive today because of them,”'

‘future-proofing healthcare supply will require increased and accelerated momentum with our second-level schools to promote the . . . healthcare professions and roles as attractive value-based careers”.’

‘over-recruitment of more than 900 staff – undertaken locally by hospitals without formal approval from the Health Service Executive or Department of Health – up to 2024 had resulted in “recurring unfunded pay costs”’ www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

Carroll MacNeill plans in-house HSE ‘agency’ staff to reduce payouts to outside companies (expenditure on agency staff has grown to €903.4 million last year – an increase of €100 million on the previous year). www.irishtimes.com/politics/oir...

‘He says they consider their work as paramedics “as a duty towards our people . . . every Lebanese [person], we consider them our family.”’ www.irishtimes.com/world/middle...

‘the argument for the taxpayer having much greater clarity about where the €5 billion funding to voluntary hospitals is going has been eloquently made for it by the Rotunda’ www.irishtimes.com/business/202...

Fintan O'Toole: 'the attempt by the Rotunda board to defy a Government plan to ensure equal treatment for all mothers in publicly-funded hospitals was not just a blast from the past. It was an attempt to control the future'. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...

Rotunda agrees to Minister’s demands on public-only consultants taking private work www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

Health Minister will not meet Rotunda board until it accepts Government policy on consultants www.irishtimes.com/health/2026/...

‘Two out of three of the Dublin maternity hospitals have now sought an exemption from Sláintecare, the policy designed to remove private practice from public hospitals’ www.irishtimes.com/health/2026/...

Minister for Health casts doubt on Rotunda insurance in row over private maternity care

‘health committee chair Pádraig Rice, who is a Social Democrats TD…said “the Rotunda, or any other hospital, cannot take it upon itself to unpick the public-only consultant contract”.’ www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

More than 32,000 adults waiting over a year for physiotherapy and other primary care assessments www.irishtimes.com/health/2026/...

Good to see coverage of doctor retention/return in the @irishtimes.com alongside a discussion of the possibility of government backed loans/grants for students wishing to study graduate entry medicine.

NEW — My first true foray into AI haterdom is about how those of us not convinced by AI’s inevitability are a real constituency worthy of a voice. Give it a read:

Doctors have had to return to work one day after experiencing a miscarriage due to pressures on the public health system, TDs and Senators have heard. www.imt.ie/news/workpla...

Two new facts stand out: 1. 85% of hallucinated citations in preprints are also in the subsequent journal version (thanks, peer review!) 2. Fake cites more likely to use the names of (male) scholars who are already highly cited, creating a fake-citation Matthew effect. arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

Ireland’s diaspora strategy: ‘the impression is very much of a strategy designed to sidestep the reality of why Irish people emigrate and how difficult it is to come home’ www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...

More than half of nursing home staff believe that staff shortages are affecting the quality of care residents receive, while more than four-in-five say they didn’t have enough time to provide residents with the care they need, a new survey has found. www.imt.ie/news/staff-s...

Why return of service won’t fix doctor retention: ‘when those retention periods end, the doctors will still leave, because the housing still will not exist and the system still will not work’ www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...

How can examining the way governance and leadership interact across different levels of the healthcare system help improve healthcare? Our new Explain THIS microlearning resource breaks it down, offering a quick, clear guide with practical questions to aid planning. Explore it here: ths.im/3R0AvC4

Wow this is some intervention ….https://www.rte.ie/news/munster/2026/0511/1572742-university-hospital-limerick/

There is a way out of our political spiral, and it is thrilling and inspiring. We could have a very different country. This week's column. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

NEW: I’ve written a call to arms. Journalists are being murdered in unprecedented numbers by a Western ally that operates with total impunity. Enough. Publishers & editors have failed us. But if we can’t speak up about this, what is journalism even for? open.substack.com/pub/broligar...

‘To go into work knowing that I am not able to the best that I know I can do ... that’s heartbreaking’ www.irishtimes.com/health/2026/...

‘Dr Maya Sharma has been forced to sleep rough in London, having had difficulties in finding work since raising red flags about prescribing practices at South Kerry CAMHS’ www.rte.ie/news/2026/04...

Learning is a difficult and slow process. There are no shortcuts. And it is this process (reading, thinking, engaging) that makes analysis itself possible - to suggest that the heavy lifting can be outsourced in this way fundamentally misunderstands, and indeed undermines, the purpose of education.

🚨 The board of the new Children’s Hospital has signalled another major delay in its opening, saying that the remaining defects in the build - of which there are almost 12,500 - are “more complex and increasingly time-consuming to resolve” (🧵)

It is time for greater ambition in medical workforce design, according to Dr Suzanne Crowe https://bit.ly/3OYxuRS @RCSI_Irl @Slaintecare @NDTP_HSE @HDRM_Project @HSELive @roinnslainte #staffrentions #healthcare#staff

“Writing is thinking”

IMO AGM 26: IMO to develop paper on safe medical staffing levels https://bit.ly/4mOTWtq @HSELive @roinnslainte #medicalstaffing

‘Organisations sometimes attribute turnover to bad managers when the deeper cause is an overly stretched workforce’

Elderly Irishman deported by US to Costa Rica under countries’ controversial deal

‘AI use will make us all stupider and it will make us feel more alone. Use your words, people. At the end of the day, they’re all we’ve got’ Patrick Freyne www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

“the Irish health services, and the people of this country, are utterly dependent on the contribution of international doctors, nurses and support staff”. @irishmedicalorg.bsky.social www.irishtimes.com/health/2026/...

‘Seventy-five years after the Mother and Child scheme, provision for a single-tier health system in the Republic remains a work in progress’ www.irishtimes.com/history/2026...

This is quite extraordinary- scientists set a kind of trap for AI chat bots by inventing a fake disease. AI told people it was real and… the deliberately bogus preprints started being cited in peer reviewed literature 🫣 🧪 #MedSky www.nature.com/articles/d41...