Health Service Executive Director General Tony O' Brien has said frontline health services require significant extra investment "to begin to repair the impact of six to seven years of austerity and move towards acceptable levels of service".
The HSE is seeking around €1.9bn in extra funding for next year, in its budget estimates 2016 submission to Government, seen by RTÉ News.
The submission from Mr O' Brien says that €1.4bn of this is needed just to keep the existing level of service, without new developments, or dealing with the growing and ageing population.
It says that an additional €579m is needed to improve services (€419m) and to deal with the demographic changes (€160m).
The HSE also wants to recruit an extra 5,000 staff - a 5% increase on current levels, with most of these for frontline services.
It says that the extra staffing would come on stream between 2016 and late 2017, or early 2018.
The HSE has said there is a lead-in time to the recruitment of new staff, which can often be significant, particularly for scarce clinical staff.
This would bring HSE staff numbers to 106,400.
Mr O'Brien said the HSE has a formal obligation to set out clearly what is necessary to address the deficiencies in services and provide a safe environment for those that use the services and work in them.
Meanwhile, figures show the number of senior HSE managers has increased from 659 to 838 since June 2012.
The figures provided by the HSE to Fianna Fáil health spokesperson Billy Kelleher show a 30% increase in staff at national director, assistant national director, general manager and Grade 8 levels.
Mr Kelleher said the Government promised to scrap the HSE because it is top-heavy with management and yet it is people in management that they have hired, instead of people on the frontline.
The HSE said after the introduction of the government moratorium on recruitment and promotion across the public sector in March 2009, there was a 15.8% cut in health service management and administrative staff equating to around 2,842 staff.
In its response to questions raised by Mr Kelleher, the executive said that recent reforms such as the establishment of Hospital Groups and Community Healthcare Organisations require new management structures to manage the new organisations.
It also said some staff who had assumed higher roles and responsibilities without extra pay had to be regularised.
