Health costs: The privatisation of healthcare services will only result in additional costs being passed on to patients and their families, a UK professor who is due to speak at a conference in the Republic this week, has warned.
Prof Allyson Pollock, chair of health policy and health services research at University College, London, said it "is ludicrous to think that you can actually deliver and run and operate hospitals or health services more efficiently in the private sector than you can in the public" sector.
Her comments come at at time when there are plans to attract private investment to fund primary healthcare centres across the State and as the Minister for Health Mary Harney seeks expressions of interest from investors willing to build private hospitals adjacent to existing public hospitals so that 1,000 private beds can be moved out of public hospitals over the next five years.
Prof Pollock said all the major economic reviews around the world had shown central taxation was the fairest and most just way of funding healthcare.
"Unfortunately Ireland is going down the same route as new Labour (in Britain) in that its embracing private finance, PPPs and privatisation . . . the private sector comes in in order to make a profit . . . the for profit private sector cannot deliver as efficiently because it is operating on different principles, it is operating along the market lines," she said.
The private sector has additional costs in billing, marketing, and paying shareholders, she added. Prof Pollock said the biggest challenge facing all healthcare systems across the world was not an ageing population and funding issues but the drive towards privatisation. She will speak at the fourth annual Population Health Summer School which takes place in Cork on Thursday and Friday.
Another speaker, consultant geriatrician Dr Cillian Twomey, who was a member of the taskforce which drew up the controversial Hanly report, will tell the conference of his frustration at the lack of progress on health service reform. There were lots of reports but not much action on the ground in terms of implementing them, he said.
He will also criticise the way in which we seem to treat an older person with disability differently to the way we treat somebody who gets an acute illness.
"Somebody who gets acutely ill in our system today by and large gets a very good service and if he or she were to get several different serious illnesses there is the possibility of intervention fairly promptly without question . . . we have a slightly different attitude to somebody who gets an acute stroke who doesn't get better because their stroke disables them. Our system seems to be somewhat impatient with that particular type of medical problem," he said.
"We have no difficulty about pulling out all the stops for the acute side of things but I think there is an unfairness about the way we deal with patients who get ill and, if you like, don't oblige the system by either getting better quickly or perhaps dying quickly. But they are hanging there in a kind of a limbo and they are then given this global convenient label of medically discharged which I think is at the very least unfortunate and certainly undeserved labelling," he added.