Private hospitals must accept lower prices, says NTPF chief

National Treatment Purchase Fund plans to get more patients treated with same budget as last year

PRIVATE HOSPITALS will have to accept lower prices for treating patients under the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) this year, the fund’s chief executive, Pat O’Byrne, said yesterday.

He stressed that the fund, which arranges private care for public patients waiting months to be seen, has the same budget in 2010 as it had last year, but it plans to treat more patients with the same €90 million allocation.

Mr O’Byrne expects to be able to have 5 per cent more work carried out this year – treating an extra 1,500 patients – for the same money.

This will be done by securing better deals with private hospitals and negotiations with them are now under way, he said. Given that wages in the private sector are falling, he expects their prices for procedures to follow suit, he said.

Staff at the Mater Private in Dublin and the Bon Secours Hospital group have served notice of strike action over pay cuts scheduled to be introduced this month.

Mr O’Byrne said the NTPF had already been able to negotiate a 12-15 per cent reduction in prices for most procedures, including hip replacements and tonsillectomies since 2006, given it was treating greater volumes of patients, and he is confident further reductions will be achieved during the current round of negotiations.

“If we do not like the price quoted, we do not have to use every hospital because there is quite an amount of private capacity out there at the moment,” he said.

Treatment was arranged by the NTPF for about 28,000 public patients last year including more than 19,000 inpatient/day cases, more than 6,000 outpatients and 3,000 patients needing MRI scans.

Once a patient is more than three months on a public hospital waiting list, treatment can be sought under the NTPF. But for outpatients, where waiting times are longest, the situation is different, as the NTPF is still tackling outpatient waiting times on a pilot basis only.

Meanwhile, latest waiting list data from the Health Service Executive shows that while numbers waiting for inpatient treatment in hospitals across the State have dropped slightly over the past year, numbers awaiting day case treatment have actually increased.

The figures indicate there were 16,406 patients waiting for inpatient treatment at the end of November last, down 823 on the numbers waiting in January 2009. But day case waiting lists over the same period have increased by 1,078 from 23,046 to 24,124.

The increased day case waiting list is likely to be as a result of the HSE drive to have more patients treated on a day case basis.

Overall, the latest figures indicate some 40,530 patients were on public hospital waiting lists for day case or inpatient treatment at the end of November. Of these, 19,650 patients were waiting more than three months for care.

Among children, 366 were waiting one to two years and 80 were waiting two years or more to be seen. Some 1,798 adults were waiting between 12 and 24 months, while 346 were waiting more than two years.

Mr O’Byrne said the NTPF concentrated last year on removing those waiting more than 12 months from waiting lists and this year it would be focusing on removing those waiting more than nine months.

He said the hospitals with the longest waiting times were Crumlin, Temple Street, Tallaght and Tullamore, and they accounted for more than half the number of patients waiting more than 12 months to be seen.

“It’s a source of frustration for us that they have not been dealt with,” he said.