State 'not exposed' if hospital projects cancelled

THE STATE would not be left exposed to costs if plans to develop a number of co-located hospitals did not go ahead, the secretary general of the Department of Health has said.

Michael Scanlan told the Public Accounts Committee that the hospitals’ future was in the hands of the preferred bidders and their ability to generate funds.

The co-located hospitals were not mentioned in the HSE service plan for 2011, but Mr Scanlan said this did not mean his department had changed its position or was not engaging with the preferred bidders over the hospitals.

The Government and former minister for health Mary Harney have been frequently criticised since plans were announced in 2005 to build 10 co-located hospitals on the grounds of public hospitals across the State to free up private beds for public patients.

Fine Gael has pledged to scrap the co-location plan if it is in government and Labour has said the plan does not make sense as the numbers taking out health insurance have fallen.

Responding to committee chairman Bernard Allen (FG), Mr Scanlan said “from a policy point of view” the plans were not stalled, but that the bidders were facing issues such as generating funding for the projects in a “changed financial market” and how the bidders should react to comments from health insurer VHI indicating it is satisfied with the existing number of private hospital beds. Mr Scanlan said should the projects not go ahead, “there is no exposure to the State”.

Separately, Mr Scanlan said the “absence of a good financial management system” in the HSE was a deficit to the health service.

Replying to Fine Gael TD Michael D’Arcy, who asked if the HSE was providing data to the department early enough to allow emerging problems to be detected, Mr Scanlan said “it needs to be better”. He said there were 11 data systems in use in the HSE and that finding information about the numbers employed in particular care programmes was quite complicated because of this. At corporate level [the HSE] has difficulty getting behind data because of the management system,” Mr Scanlan said.

Mr D’Arcy had earlier said it could be perceived that the department had shifted responsibility for providing information for parliamentary questions to the HSE.

Meanwhile, National Treatment Purchase Fund chief executive Pat O’Byrne said the national median waiting time for patients seeking operations stood at 2.4 months in December. He said outpatient appointments were one of the “bottlenecks” in the public hospital system and that it was necessary to call almost double the number of patients that “one actually wishes to provide treatment for”.

Mr O’Byrne said 82,144 patients were contacted with an offer of an outpatient appointment in the last five years, but almost half did not want an appointment, did not know they were on a waiting list or were removed from the waiting list by their hospital.

The committee was told that in 225 cases last year, consultants who had no time to treat patients in public hospitals ended up taking the same patients off waiting lists by treating them privately when paid by the fund.

Fianna Fáil TD Seán Fleming said he was concerned about the decision of VHI to increase charges by up to 45 per cent for some customers. He said the insurer should be made to reveal how much it pays for procedures, which VHI describes as commercially sensitive information.