Independent financial consultants submitted a damning report on the Irish Health Service to the Government as it prepared its new health strategy, it emerged today.
In its
Audit of the Irish Health System for Value for Money
, consultants Deloitte and Touche found there are too many vested local interests within the system.
This, it said, prevented change and prohibited the delivery of value for money in the individual health boards.
The report said the "inability of the health service to move rapidly in developing an effective value for money process reflects the multiplicity of organisations within the service".
The report also expressed concern that there are insufficient personnel to implement and manage change within the system itself.
"The Irish system currently lacks any formal, broadly based value for money framework supported by management processes, consistently applied," it said.
It concluded that the health service has been struggling since a serious "level of under-funding" of services in the 1980’s.
It said: "The health services throughout the 1990’s have therefore been grappling with two fundamental problems in meeting the public’s expectation; one is the need to make up the investment deficit of the 1980’s, the second is the cost of those higher service levels and new procedures."
"No assessment of the Irish health system can overlook the serious capacity limitations in bed numbers and medical manpower, which limit the attainment of value for money from a patient perspective and which lie behind many of the pressure points in the system," it said.