Minister believes Slaintecare reforms will be completed before 2030
The required time for the implementation of Sláintecare reforms may be less than the 10-year horizon previously envisaged, according to the Minister for Health Simon Harris.
“I think we’ve accelerated this because we’ve made a decision that from next year we will only issue new contracts for public-only consultants,” Mr Harris said today at the HSE’s latest winter briefing in Dublin.
Asked how long the switch-over to an entirely public health system might take in reality, the minister said “it depends on the uptake”.
“The level of time it takes will depend on how many consultants decide to switch over,” he said, adding that it’s planned to recruit an additional 1,000 consultants by the year 2030.
The De Buitleir report on the removal of private care from public hospitals, which was finally published last August, recommended that starting consultant salaries should be increased to their pre-2012 levels in order to fill the backlog of vacancies within the health service, a figure that stands at more than 700 at present.
That recommendation appears to have been satisfied by Mr Harris’s pre-Christmas announcement that from next year such salaries will be paid at levels up to €222,000, with the caveat that the contracts in question will be for public-only work.
However, prior to the publication of the De Buitleir report a senior civil servant at the Department of Health said that the process of removing private care from hospitals would be “likely to be over a 30-year period”.
No official pronouncements as to the recommendations of the report have as yet been issued from Government. Were those recommendations to be applied in full, the cost to the Exchequer would be an estimated €1.5bn.
The Minister also commented on a controversial Facebook post posted last week by a County Offaly Catholic parish, which dismissed the process of in vitro fertilisation as “totally incompatible with our Catholic faith”.
“I think the comments were unfortunate, insensitive and hurtful,” he said, adding that the “idea that any Christian would find (IVF) objectionable is something that I’ll never understand or comprehend”.
He said that it remains his intention that IVF will be funded and provided by the public health service in future. At present a round of the treatment can cost up to €7,000 via private treatment.
Separately, the winter briefing heard that the number of over-75s attending hospital emergency departments over the Christmas holidays had spiked by 24.9% on the same week in 2018.
In terms of action on the seasonal influenza virus, the briefing noted that the numbers of those attending hospital have begun to drop, a possible side effect of the season arriving some four weeks earlier than expected.
