Private hospitals on public sites to free up 1,000 beds, says Harney

Caroline O’Doherty and Catherine Shanahan

Health Minister Mary Harney will kick-start the scheme by reclaiming for public use 1,000 public beds currently used by private patients. She expects private developers to provide 1,000 replacement beds in new hospitals by 2010.

The move is part of the Government's strategy to tackle hospital waiting lists and accident and emergency overcrowding by increasing national bed numbers in public hospitals by 3,000.

Ms Harney said yesterday freeing up 1,000 beds for public use would go a long way to achieving this without the costs of building public wards. She called it "a win-win situation".

The key features of the plan are:

Private developers will buy or lease a site on existing public hospital grounds.

They will build hospitals with at least 80 beds.

They will carry the full costs of construction, equipping and staffing.

They can avail of existing tax breaks for private hospital development.

Their income will come from private patients, public patients paid for by the

National Treatment Purchase Fund, and services supplied to their neighbouring public hospital.

The cost to the State will be around E170 million, made up of a loss of annual income of E145m for private use of the 1,000 beds plus E25m for extra hospital consultants and support staff. Building new public facilities to provide 1,000 beds would cost E500m.

Disclosing the plan yesterday, Ms Harney said: "By now encouraging new private hospitals to take a substantial number of private and semi-private beds out of our public hospitals, we will create new beds for public patients in the fastest and most cost-effective way."

A number of developers already have plans at an "advanced stage", the minister said, and she was confident this would speed up the process of returning the 1,000 beds to public use.

The plan will create pressure for an end to the controversial mixed public-private contracts for hospital consultants. Ms Harney said she envisaged a new category of full-time public consultant being created.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association and the Irish Medical Organisation expressed scepticism about the success of the plan and VHI warned it could push up private healthcare costs.

That view was echoed by analyst Aongus Loughlin, healthcare specialist at Watson Wyatt consultants, who said private health insurance premiums were bound to increase.

Mr Loughlin said there was already a huge difference in charges for private patients from E501 a night for a private bed in the country's larger public hospitals to E1,000 a night in the Blackrock Clinic.

Fine Gael said the plan was "yet another major announcement by a Government without a credible track record on delivery", while Labour said the Government was using private hospitals as "some kind of panacea to the ills that beset the health service.