Health service to need an extra €600m, says Siptu

Siptu claims the health system is likely to need an addtional €600m this year — but questions where the additional monies can be found.

In its Liberty magazine, union economist Marie Sherlock wrote that it is not clear where funding will come from to shorten waiting list times, expand ambulance services, increase funding for fair deal units, and recruit more nurses.

She said huge changes and cost efficiencies were promised arising from the disbandment of the HSE and the establishment of hospital trusts, but that the history of major changes to health systems across the world suggests money has to be spent before it can be saved.

She said commitments to allow hospitals to establish their recruitment procedures implies a move towards individual wage setting.

“If the recruitment and budgetary crises in Irish hospitals were bad before this, they will almost certainly worsen as hospitals compete on consultant pay,” said Ms Sherlock.

While she said the key to resolving what she described as the “bottleneck that is the Irish hospital system” lies in developing fully functioning primary care centres, she said commitments to such centres “ring hollow as free GP care will now only be extended to the under-18s, while expansion of services in primary care centres will depend on the use of tax reliefs and other State incentives to private investors”.

“There is a clear lesson from the past,” she said. “When the delivery of public policy is outsourced to developers and investors and the private sector, the costs to the exchequer can escalate and the benefits to the taxpayer and general population are greatly reduced.

“So far, it doesn’t look like the €3.175bn expenditure planned in the programme for government will go very far in covering all of the new Government’s plan.”