Ramsay Health boss Craig McNally says the private hospital giant is investing to ensure it is the employer of choice for healthcare staff as COVID-related fatigue disrupts the industry.

The $14.7 billion medical giant told investors on Thursday that its numbers had been “severely impacted” by new waves of COVID-19, which increased costs, led to staff absenteeism and shut down elective surgeries in a number of its markets.

Mr McNally told this masthead the business had doubled its intake of graduate nurses in Australia and was ensuring staff had “time and space to re-energise” to ensure retention of workers in an industry already stretched before the pandemic.

“The workforce is fatigued...and we see more fatigue where there has been a lot of pressure from treating COVID patients,” he said.

He said the business would wear the costs of investing in graduate staff with a view to the longer term.

“We are still going to see an elevated cost base above what you will see in FY23 - but that will come back in line,” he said.

Ramsay has operations across Australia, Asia, the UK and Europe, and its hospital network has been lending its services to public health systems to support them through coronavirus surges since 2020.

Revenues were up 2.6 per cent in constant currency terms at $6.7 billion for the six months through December, but profits declined 31.3 per cent in constant currency to $158.9 million during the period.

Results across all the group’s countries were “materially impacted” by the new wave of the pandemic, management said, which led to “restrictions on surgical capacity and the flow-on effects of isolation orders and movement restrictions on the availability of staff, clinicians and patients and the resultant impact on revenue and costs”.