Southdoc won't be penalised by HSE over closure of two Cork and Kerry facilities

The HSE and Department of Agriculture also may have had questions over as many as 29 separate hand sanitiser products sourced during the initial Covid procurement phase

Cork Labour TD Sean Sherlock said: “More and more people are going to CUH on an A&E basis and bypassing SouthDoc because they are not confident they are being seen at SouthDoc." Photo: Eddie O'Hare

The HSE has said it is not in a position to penalise the SouthDoc out-of-hours GP service over the prolonged closure of two of its facilities as “there isn’t evidence that they weren’t providing a service”.

Two of SouthDoc's busiest clinics were kept closed until recent weeks despite HSE funding for the Cork-Kerry out-of-hours GP service being increased this year. SouthDoc did not reopen its clinics at Blackpool in Cork and Listowel in Kerry after their closure due to Covid until the start of this month, despite receiving a €200,000 increase in funding from the HSE for a 2021 budget of €7.5m.

At a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee this morning, HSE officials were questioned at length about the two SouthDoc closures.

The HSE had previously repeatedly raised its concerns with SouthDoc, indicating that the unilateral closure of the Listowel and Blackpool facilities amounted to “at the very least a breach of our trust and working arrangements”.

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However, at this morning’s meeting HSE chief operating officer Anne O’Connor said: “We’ve looked at their (SouthDoc’s) activity, we’ve looked at their costs, and we don’t have evidence that they didn’t deliver a service.”

Addressing Fine Gael TD for Cork Colm Burke, Ms O’Connor said that despite the two services being closed “patients would be referred to another centre”.

She dismissed the idea that patients were attending Cork University Hospital rather than being referred to another SouthDoc facility up to four miles away, something she said is “not necessarily” the case.

“These centres are not walk-in facilities,” she said. “We’ve looked at their costs, their activity would indicate that they still saw a lot of people.”

Cork Labour TD Sean Sherlock said there is “a fear” that the €7.5m SouthDoc Service Level Agreement “is not buying enough scrutiny of the service being provided”.

“More and more people are going to CUH on an A&E basis and bypassing SouthDoc because they are not confident they are being seen at SouthDoc,” Mr Sherlock said.

The meeting also heard that the HSE and Department of Agriculture may have had questions over as many as 29 separate hand sanitiser products sourced during the initial Covid procurement phase.

Sinn Féin’s Imelda Munster produced a freedom of information response she had received from the HSE, suggesting that a large number of these products had been under scrutiny and may have been placed in quarantine.

All of those products bar one - Beaver hand sanitiser, which the Department of Agriculture had refused to clear for use in Ireland despite the HSE having purchased €3.3m worth of the product - were redacted in Ms Munster’s FOI response.

She said that following last week’s hearing, she had been under the impression that there were no other sanitiser products currently sitting unused in storage.

“I accept that some of these products may have been donations, but how many products purchased by the HSE can’t be used, and what is the total value of such?” she asked. HSE chief financial officer Stephen Mulvany replied that no detail on that was immediately available. “We’ll have to do you a note,” Mr Mulvany said.

HSE CEO Paul Reid said regarding the same question “we were in the middle of a complete world chase for PPE, and we erred on the side of safeguarding the public”.

“This agency punched well above its weight,” he said of the HSE’s procurement at the time, describing the situation like one of “Ebay-level bidding wars” between countries.