Hospital targets put funding at risk

HOSPITALS will forfeit a slice of their annual funding for failing to tackle the A&E crisis and to maintain acceptable hygiene standards, it was learned yesterday.

The Health Service Executive (HSE) is to withhold around €65 million in annual funding, a figure that represents around 2% of total funding for the year.

A reward process will start next month and involve funding in the order of €32m for the second half of this year.

The HSE’s A&E Task Force chairwoman Angela Fitzgerald denied that they were penalising hospitals.

She said the targets they had set for the hospitals to reduce overcrowding in A&Es were very achievable, and the HSE would be helping hospitals with special problems beyond their control.

Ms Fitzgerald, who also announced that the HSE is to provide greater detail on A&E waiting times, said hospitals had been set individual targets that were being measured on both a daily and a weekly basis.

“The financial incentives are aimed at supporting hospitals who make things happen faster,” she said.

The HSE says patients awaiting admission should not be on a trolley for more than 24 hours in A&E and that there should not be more than 10 patients on trolleys at any one time.

Ms Fitzgerald said the HSE accepted that the problem faced by most Dublin hospitals was delayed discharges and the authority was dealing with that.

Arrangements had been reached with nursing homes to provide 380 beds and more than 200 of those beds were taken up, she said. This process would be repeated at least twice a year.

Five weeks ago, there were 540 delayed-discharge patients. Last week there were 309.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA), however, condemned the plan to penalise hospitals for failing to achieve A&E targets.

IHCA assistant secretary general Donal Duffy said the association did not want to see any patients on trolleys but, realistically, the majority of the problems were outside the hospitals’ control.

“Until delayed discharges are eliminated, it is inappropriate to penalise hospitals in that way,” he said.

The Irish Nurses Organisation is concerned that patients awaiting elective surgery would suffer the consequences of any funding cut.

Its general secretary Liam Doran said they had yet to be persuaded that a hospital’s budget could be used to improve the experience of patients.