Exposed: the litany of wasted cash in our health service

VHI and BUPA were let off on a 1 million bill to a public hospital because the doctors wouldn’t give details of the treatment provided to a private patient.

A health board employee was overpaid around 30,000 over a 10-month period and another health board paid over almost 450,000 for a site it was buying, even though the ownership of the land was not sorted out.

Going through a litany of poor financial management in the health service, Professor Niamh Brennan yesterday cited the failure of public hospitals to properly impose or collect bills for treating public patients as a classic example discovered during the preparation of the Brennan Report.

“In excess of 1 million in private patient charges could not be billed by one particular hospital to the VHI and BUPA because hospital consultants had not supplied the necessary information in respect of their patients. The patients of three consultants accounted for almost half of the outstanding monies,” she said.

The author of the Brennan Report listed off examples of poor planning, unauthorised expenditure, accounting deficiencies and inadequate records in the health service.

Taxpayers didn’t resent paying money for the health service, but they do resent their money being wasted, she said.

“Taxpayers are entitled to expect their money is well spent,” she said.

The North-West Health Board bought a site at Ballinamore, Co Leitrim for 445,000, but the purchase was not complete because of problems over title, yet the cheque was paid over to the vendors.

“Why would you pay the cheque if the title had not been cleared,” Prof Brennan asked.

The chairperson of the Commission on Financial Management and Control Systems in the Health Service, known as the Brennan Report, also said that the taxpayer deserved the same standards of accountability as the shareholders of any public limited company.

“The Companies Bill, currently going through the Oireachtas, proposes that directors of companies be required to sign directors’ compliance statements. This begs the question: If such a regime is appropriate for the private sector, should legislators not apply such standards to the public sector?

“We have recommended that consideration be given to establishing similar enforcement arrangement for bodies corporate in the health sector,” he said.

The Brennan Report, published last June, made 136 recommendations on improving the cost effectiveness of the health services, but Prof Brennan said cherry picking from the proposals was not going to solve the issues.