HOSPITALS HAVE been given a stark warning by Minister for Health James Reilly not to come looking for extra money this year as there is none available.
In a stiff rebuke to Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, when it warned it would run out of money before the end of the year unless it cut services, Dr Reilly said all hospitals had to live within budget. He said the EU and IMF were not just at the door but “in the parlour” and in such circumstances hospitals had to deliver services from the allocated funding for 2011.
At the end of April the HSE had run up a deficit of more than €183 million, of which €99 million was accounted for by hospitals. It is now drawing up cost containment plans which could involve ward and theatre closures and the cancellation of planned surgery.
Crumlin ran up a deficit of €2.8 million during the first four months of the year. The deficit run up by the Mid-Western Regional Hospital Limerick over the same period was €11.3 million, at University Hospital in Galway it was €6.5 million and at Tallaght hospital €5.9 million.
Speaking after attending the opening of an intensive care unit at Crumlin hospital, Dr Reilly said hospitals had to not alone stay within budget but also be answerable to the public in relation to the steps they took to achieve this.
“We’ve all got to live within the budget that we have been given. And there’s no ifs, buts or anything else about that, that’s the way it is,” he said.
It was up to hospitals rather than him to decide where to save money, he said. “Nobody knows better how to manage their budget and what services should be prioritised than the clinicians and management of the given hospital or institution”.
Dr Reilly said he was convinced more could be done with less money. For example, he said, if theatres start earlier in the morning twice as many scoliosis patients could be operated on, giving a lot of relief to children in pain. “And that won’t cost a huge amount of money,” he said.
The Minister met the chairman of the Crumlin hospital board, Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin, prior to the opening of the new unit.
Dr Martin said afterwards he was obliged to draw the attention of the Minister to the difficulties that were emerging with the hospital’s finances. “I’m optimistic that we will find a way to ensure that any cutbacks will be minimal,” he said.
“We just hope that we will be able to have cutbacks which don’t affect the service level . . . but . . . even as an archbishop I’m not into miracles,” he added.
Next year, he said, they had been told “the cuts will be even more and it’s very hard to see how you can keep the current level of service on a constantly reduced budget”.
Precise cutbacks had not been decided upon for Crumlin hospital yet, he added, but the impact of a number of steps including theatre closures had been outlined to Dr Reilly. The Minister said he would be fighting very hard to ensure the health budget, which was cut by €1 billion this year, would not be reduced further next year.