Query over €1m bonus v €50 home help

HEALTH Service Executive (HSE) bosses were awarded €1.23 million in bonus payments in 2006, yet a man could not get four hours of home help to keep his elderly mother out of a nursing home, a Dáil committee heard yesterday.

Fine Gael TD Padraic McCormack told the public accounts committee how a small farmer in Clonbur, Co Galway, was managing to keep his elderly mother at home since 2005 with eight hours of home help provided by the HSE.

When one of the assistants left last year because of family reasons, the farmer was unable to get a replacement because of the recruitment embargo.

Mr McCormack said the man struggled to keep his mother at home but was eventually forced to put her in a nursing home, costing €2,000 a week.

Mr McCormack said he had to explain to the man that HSE chiefs could award themselves €1.23m in 2006 but could not find the €50 a week to help keep his mother at home.

Earlier, the secretary general of the Department of Health, Michael Scanlon, said the rapid increase in healthcare spending in recent years was delivering more healthcare for more people and there had been unprecedented improvements in the health of Irish people.

“The health system cannot claim credit for all these improvements but it has been estimated that health service interventions and treatments account for close to 50% of the improvements we have seen,” he said.

Public accounts committee chairman Bernard Allen questioned the high satisfaction level of about 90% mentioned by HSE chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm based on an independent survey of the views of 3,500 people.

Mr Allen said the study was upsetting because it was out of touch with reality.

Prof Drumm said such studies were commissioned as part of the HSE’s quality control programme and said that if people did not believe them, “maybe we should stop doing them”.

Mr Allen also complained that the HSE financial account for 2006 itemised money spent on travel, subsistence and consultancy work. The HSE’s director of finance, Liam Woods, said the authority was planning to show a breakdown of such payments in the future.

He said the health authority spent €7.96m on consultancy work in 2006 and the largest payment of €1.4m was paid to Accenture for providing support for the PPRS project.

The second highest payment, at €412,000, was for work done in relation to the authority’s hygiene audit while the third highest payment, at €354,000, was in relation to advice received on information technology.

Comptroller and Auditor General, John Purcell, said the figures were there but the way they were presented was quite meaningless for anyone wanting to make sense of them.