Kenny blames health overspend on ‘incompetence’ or ‘mismanagement’

TAOISEACH Enda Kenny has accused hospitals of either “incompetence” or “mismanagement” after a HSE report showed they were €120 million over budget less than halfway through the year.

Mr Kenny said the HSE could not allow a situation to continue where “year after year, budgets are allocated to hospitals, hospitals sign on for those budgets and hospitals sign on to deliver services based on those budgets and halfway through the year you find that they are completely out of control”.

Mr Kenny warned that Health Minister James Reilly had “already made it clear that there is no more money to be allocated because there is no more available”.

Mr Kenny’s comments come in the wake of the publication of a HSE monthly performance report which shows that the executive has overspent its budget for the year-to-date by €170m.

The bulk of the overspend was generated by the country’s 50-plus hospitals.

As an “immediate” corrective measure, the HSE said it intended to “pause recruitment to all but critical vacancies in light of the trends in basic pay costs”.

However, trade union IMPACT said this measure was “a management excuse for accelerating the use of agency staff” and that the moratorium introduced in 2009 had, at any rate, limited recruitment to critical vacancies.

National secretary Louise O’Donnell criticised the HSE for not raising the budget overrun in a meeting with unions during the week. She said it had previously worked out ways to cut costs with the unions, but no such talks had occurred this time.

She also said the HSE recruitment freeze would mean physiotherapists, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists would not be recruited, despite the fact they were essential to implement the HSE’s acute care programmes.

“To deliver [the acute care programmes], they actually need more of these therapy grades because the target is to reduce bed nights and to get people to manage in their own environment, so I think this is a very short-term solution and I don’t think they have actually thought it out,” Ms O’Donnell said.

HSE director of finance Liam Woods told RTÉ radio that a €170m overrun equated to just 3% of the overall health budget of approximately €14 billion, which had been cut by €1bn this year.

He admitted some hospitals have significant financial issues, and that childcare services and medical card services were additional pressure points. However, he said individual hospitals and each of the four HSE regions had plans in place “to deal with the financial challenges they are facing”.

He could not give details of individual hospital responses to budget deficits, but said steps such as seasonal closures of wards during the summer months would result in cost savings.