HSE CHIEF executive Prof Brendan Drumm has warned of massive cuts to health services unless the Government takes on the challenge of public sector reform.
Prof Drumm, who revealed yesterday that he will step down next year, said the HSE on its own would not be able to make the cuts required of it, without action by the Government to reform working arrangements across the public sector.
His comments come as unions representing public sector staff meet this week to establish a common position on resisting cuts in out-of-hours pay or allowances.
Mr Drumm yesterday confirmed that staff numbers in the HSE would be cut by 6,000 over the next couple of years unless other ways were found of making savings, including reductions in pay.
He told RTÉ Radio's This Weekprogramme that frontline services such as homecare and hip replacements would have to be cut unless the HSE was allowed to accelerate the ''reconfiguration'' of the health services.
‘‘Irish people have some serious choices to make. We cannot continue to have 11 AEs open in Dublin every night. No city in the world needs that. We cannot continue to run services in Dublin each night which have surgical units for something like vascular surgery on five sites. We cannot continue across this country to keep AE departments open after 9pm that only see two or three people after midnight and most with very minor illnesses.’’
‘‘We cannot continue to keep overnight surgical services across this country which do only one overnight operation each month or have one patient in intensive care each week.’’
Calling for an end to spending ‘‘in the wrong place’’, he said ‘‘money should be spent on keeping people at home instead of spending fortunes on staff overnight in services that do very little for the public’’.
Huge changes would be required in the way HSE staff worked, but the organisation would not be able to make the required cuts without Government help. The HSE needed to ‘‘reconfigure’’ how staff worked, but there were agreements across the public service that stopped it moving people where they were needed. ‘‘We have to look at the fact that we pay over €1 billion in overtime because we run a 24/7 system on a 9 to 5 payroll.’’
The Government also needed to make decisions on whether people who can pay for services such as drugs and GPs, should pay.
Mr Drumm, who is four years into a five-year contract, said he wouldn’t be seeking to renew his contract when it expired next year.
The next year would be critical with huge challenges for the HSE to tackle and big decisions to make about the €800 million in annual savings sought by the Department of Health.
A spokesman for Mr Drumm later denied that any discussions had taken place between the HSE boss and his board or the Minister for Health Mary Harney about his position once the contract expired.
Mr Drumm defended his performance as head of the HSE since 2005, saying costs had been driven down while a programme of change was well under way.