A new privately-funded hospital in Dublin has insisted it will not "cherrypick" only those patients who are easy to treat.
The 183-bed Beacon Hospital in Sandyford, which opened yesterday, has capacity to treat 17,000 patients a year. It says it will treat both public and private patients with complicated conditions, including those requiring neurosurgery and heart surgery.
It will begin treating its first patients next month. Its consultant-led emergency department, which will initially operate from 8am to 8pm, will open early next year, dealing with many types of emergencies such as patients with chest pain and fractures.
However, it will not be able to deal with what are called level- one trauma cases, such as victims of serious road crashes.
Prof Mark Redmond, a cardio-thoracic surgeon who is among a small group of people behind the venture, said private hospitals had in the past been accused of cherrypicking but the Beacon Hospital "will not shy away from any area of healthcare because it's not profitable".
It is prepared to allocate up to half its capacity to public patients but it will be up to the Health Service Executive to decide if it wants to buy this capacity from it.
Opening the €183 million facility yesterday, Minister for Health Mary Harney said patients did not care who paid for their care, whether it was the taxpayer or a health insurance company, as long as they got the best possible care. "There will be an increasing role in my view for independent healthcare providers," she said.
Ms Harney has plans to get the HSE to build private hospitals on the sites of 10 public hospitals and the Beacon Medical Group has applied to provide six of them, three in Dublin and three in the south. However Ms Harney, who hopes contracts for the provision of the hospitals can be signed early next year, said there would be no sweetheart deals.
"Any land that will be set aside for the co-location will be either sold or leased on a commercial basis. I'd prefer to see a hospital facility than car parks or lawns or empty spaces," she said.
At the moment in public hospitals there was, she added, "an enormous amount of private activity" and her plan was to move this into private hospitals on the site of public facilities, to make more beds available for public patients.
Doing it her way the extra beds, which normally cost about €1 million each, would be built, funded and managed by private providers. "It is the cheapest way of getting beds," she said. "We will get the beds at less than 50 per cent of the cost of providing them in the traditional way."
She added that she did not see independent and private providers as the answer to our healthcare problems. "I see them as complementary."
Ms Harney also said she was impressed at the speed at which the 183-bed Beacon Hospital was built, its technology and its links to Johns Hopkins Medicine International in the US, with which it will be able to discuss staff training and seek second opinions.
In addition, she said the €183 million hospital would alleviate pressure on public hospitals including their A&E units, given the number of patients it expected to treat every year.
The hospital says it has agreement "in principle" with the VHI as well as Vivas to cover patients.
Michael Cullen, who was involved in setting up the Beacon Hospital, said it would receive €70 million in tax breaks over the next 10 years, but would return €120 million to the Exchequer in taxes, so the State would benefit overall to the tune of €50 million.