The North's Minister of Health, Ms Bairbre de Brun, has presented her department's spending plans for the financial year 2000 01 and yesterday outlined a budget of £2,029 million to an open session of the Assembly health scrutiny committee.
Ms de Brun (Sinn Fein, West Belfast) said the budget had been inherited and provided her with only £17 million "room for manoeuvre" with more than half of this surplus revenue depending upon proceeds from additional duties on tobacco.
More than 70 per cent of her budget was spent on health service salaries, with acute hospital services, the treatment of children, ambulance services and capital expenditure accruing the bulk of the remaining budget.
Extra funding would be channelled into a new cancer service, additional residential childcare facilities and the Sure Start programme for disadvantaged children. "I have had many difficult choices to make in drawing up the plans. Resources are all too limited, so we need to continue to extract the best value for money from our services and to get the balance right in how we target resources," she said.
Unionist committee members recalled the controversy over the decision to locate regional maternity services in the Royal Maternity Hospital in her west Belfast constituency over the City Hospital in south Belfast. Ms de Brun said she was convinced her decision taken last week was correct, but it had been a close contest between two excellent hospitals.
The clinical argument for the Royal was based on its links with the children's hospital and the casualty department. She was asked to "take back" the decision by Ms Iris Robinson (DUP, Strangford). Mr Alan McFarland (UUP, North Down) described her explanation as "spurious".
The £235 million allocation for drug prescriptions was queried by Ms Carmel Hanna (SDLP, South Belfast). She said the figure was the highest expenditure per person in the UK. The department confirmed that each year an average of £135 per person was spent on prescriptions in the North compared to £110 in Wales, £109 in Scotland and £88 in England.
Mr John Kelly (Sinn Fein, Mid Ulster) asked Ms de Brun if the department had examined the possibility of suing tobacco companies to recoup the costs of treating smoking-related illness. She said she was following legal cases in the US and the Republic and the issue was a priority.
Meanwhile, a simultaneous spot-check on 16 accident and emergency departments in Northern Ireland has discovered that waiting times for two patients were among the worst 10 recorded in Britain.
The check, conducted by the North's four Health and Social Services councils on Monday, showed that a 37-year-old woman with chest pain waited for almost 26 hours for a bed in Lagan Valley Hospital. In Antrim Hospital, an 84-year-old man waited on a trolley for more than 20 hours.