The Minister for Health, Mr Cowen, is to insist to the board of Tallaght Hospital that it accepts responsibility for the overrun of £8.5 million when the two sides meet today. He is also expected to install within days a small team of personnel to oversee implementation of proposals in the highly critical Deloitte & Touche report. The 23-strong board met at the hospital last night to consider the contents of the report, which earlier this week showed the State's largest acute hospital to be in financial crisis and with ineffectual management systems.
A spokeswoman for the hospital said last night there would be no comment on the board's deliberations.
However, the board is expected to present detailed proposals to the Minister at today's discussions which aim to tackle the major financial difficulties now confronting the institutions. It is understood that it is only on the basis of a satisfactory outcome to these discussions that the Department of Health is willing to move to determine the hospital's expenditure for 1999.
According to senior sources, no "unauthorised expenditure will be tolerated". As a result, it is expected that Mr Cowen will continue to refuse to allocate further funding to meet the overrun in non-capital spending.
In its devastating critique, the report stipulated that the board must insist the management run the hospital within its agreed cost and operating profile before any further developments are approved.
Furthermore, the consultants recommended that before the board approved any such developments, it needed to have a detailed breakdown of capital and net revenue expenditure as well as written confirmation from the Department that the additional funding had been approved.