€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.

He said every health facility in the country had to work within an employment budget and an examination of the figures at the hospital would show there was room for flexibility.

Mr Allen said it was “sheer lunacy” to interview two people and not appoint them and called for the matter to be investigated.

He also pointed out a €5m A & E unit at Cork’s Mercy Hospital had lain idle for almost a year before it was realised there was a problem with recruiting staff to the facility.

Work on the A&E unit was completed last March but it has not opened because of differences between hospital management and the HSE on the number of staff required to run it.

Prof Drumm said negotiations on the appointment of an additional 15 nursing staff to the unit were ongoing.