HSE says all large-scale projects take five years if 'uneventful'
The HSE said for a typical undertaking valued at up to €50m, the scheme must 'work its way through the project lifecycle'.
The HSE has said large-scale multimillion euro projects it embarks upon are expected to take as long as five years to complete in an "uneventful” scenario.
The executive said for a typical undertaking valued at up to €50m, the scheme must “work its way through the project lifecycle”.
In a response to a parliamentary question from Sinn Féin’s health spokesperson David Cullinane, the HSE said all of its projects must follow the public spending code, most recently updated in December 2019, which mandates that all State-sponsored projects must pass through as many as six “decision gates” on their journey to completion.
None of those gateways represents actual full approval for any individual project.
“While there may be a commitment in principle to the policy objectives being pursued, departments and public bodies should be prepared at any stage, despite costs having been incurred... developing a project, to abandon it,” the HSE said.
The news comes amid ongoing criticism of delays regarding the implementation of Sláintecare, one of the key commitments of which is the creation of regional health area subdivisions of the health service in order to cut down on administrative bureaucracy.
The indicative timeline provided in the PQ response suggests a period of between 48 and 57 months for a project’s lifecycle.
“This assumes prompt approval at each decision gate and an uneventful journey through the planning, statutory, procurement and implementation processes,” it states.
Further, “active management” of each project is required “throughout to ensure the project outcomes are achieved and value for money secured”, it said.
Mr Cullinane said a situation where a vital hospital project could take five years at a minimum “isn’t a situation we can stand over”.
“This response shows that we have an awful lot of problems with procurement," he said.
“You can have accountability and transparency and oversight and still get things done,” he said, adding the fast-tracking seen during the Covid pandemic had shown “that we can have cost controls, but we can also have speed”.
In his own constituency, Mr Cullinane cited two projects at University Hospital Waterford which have taken an extended period of time to complete — a new mortuary at the hospital which had taken seven years to finalise, and a second cath lab at the hospital which was first mooted in 2016 and which has yet to finish.
“This is why we want to see devolved responsibility through the regions, the timelines are too long,” he said.
Regarding the HSE’s adherence to the public spending code, Mr Cullinane said his understanding “is that every department can agree its own interpretation of the code”.
“There are an awful lot of layers to it which could be done simultaneously,” he said.
“It shouldn’t take over a year to hire a hospital consultant because recruitment is centralised. It shouldn’t take five years to build fundamental infrastructure. The HSE needs to relinquish control.”
