€1.5m hospital scanner idle over ‘mismanagement’

TWO radiographers cannot be appointed to operate a €1.5 million CT scanner lying idle at Mallow Hospital in Co Cork for more than a year because of a recruitment ceiling, the state’s public spending watchdog was told yesterday.

Public Accounts Committee chairman Bernard Allen said every day five to six patients there were being transferred by ambulance to Cork University Hospital for a CT scan. “This is nothing to do with industrial relations, it is to do with mismanagement,” he said.

But Health Service Executive chief executive Professor Brendan Drumm insisted the problem arose because the hospital exceeded its employment quota.