BUDGET 2016: HSE Service Plan to determine health budget details

Most of the details of how money will actually be spent under next year’s health budget will not be available until publication of the HSE Service Plan 2016, the health minister said yesterday.

While both Health Minister Leo Varadkar and junior health minister Kathleen Lynch claimed they had secured a “substantial increase” in health service funding in Budget 2016, up €880m on 2015, at least €600m will have to go towards a supplementary budget to see out the health service for the remainder of this year.

This means just €280m in new money goes forward to next year, a 2% raise on 2015.

Ray Walley, president of the Irish Medical Organisation, said the idea of a significant increase in the health budget “is a nonsense and the proposed spending will hardly be sufficient to maintain services at current levels”.

Dr Walley also criticised failure to use the budget to increase taxes on alcohol and unhealthy drinks.

The Irish Heart Foundation said the failure to introduce a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks meant that the Government was “prioritising the wealth of multinational companies over the nation’s health”.

In relation to mental health, there were no details available other than Ms Lynch saying that the annual €35m committed to in the programme for government would be delivered.

Fair Deal, the nursing home support scheme, will receive €940m, up from €874m last year, with target waiting times for approval of no more than four weeks.

However, the Alzheimer Society of Ireland said that while it welcomed the allocation, the budget “fails to address the supports needed by the 63% of people with dementia living in our communities”.

Money, unquantified as yet, has been earmarked for extra ambulance staff and community first-responder teams.

Mr Varadkar said they wanted to move away from using response times to measure success or failure, claiming that currently, “an ambulance could response in nine minutes and the patient dies and that’s a success. An ambulance responds in 22 minutes and the patient lives and that’s a failure.”

The good news is that there will be no increase in hospital fees or prescription charges in 2016, and the threshold for the Drugs Payment Scheme, for medical cards and GP visit cards, remains unchanged.