ESRI CONFERENCE:HEALTH SPENDING may be cut by up to €1 billion next year, significantly higher than previously indicated, Minister for Health Mary Harney has said.
Speaking at a conference on health service funding in Dublin yesterday, she admitted there was “no easy way to take that kind of money out” of the health service.
While cuts in health funding last year also amounted to €1 billion, much of that was accounted for by cuts in core pay to staff.
However, under the Croke Park agreement, this year’s cuts will have to come from other areas like procurement, cutting services or perhaps staff overtime.
Ms Harney said she did not want to be specific about the actual amount to be cut from health in December’s budget, but said: “It will certainly be a minimum of €600 million and it could well be substantially higher.”
Up to now, cuts of €600-700 million had been on the cards. Asked if the cuts could go up to €1 billion, she said: “I’m not certain it will be that high, but it will be somewhere between €600 million and €1 billion.”
She said she had been engaging with the HSE’s new chief executive Cathal Magee in recent weeks on how to make the savings.
“It’s not going to be easy. There’s no easy way to take that kind of money out. Even if you’re talking about €600 million, it’s an enormous amount of money and given that pay rates can’t be cut as a result of the Croke Park agreement and 70 per cent of our budget is pay, you’re talking about taking that amount of money out of the remaining 30 per cent and that’s going to be really challenging,” she said.
“So we have to look at everything, our procurement processes, our staff ratios, five-day wards, more day activity, all the agenda items that have been pursued in recent years will be pursued even more aggressively over the next phase,” she added.
She said redeployment of staff in the health service would be crucial during 2011 and beyond “if we are going to be able to maintain services to the public”.
Mr Magee, who spoke at the same conference organised by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), refused to be drawn on how precisely the cuts will be made.
However, he told delegates he was struck by the number of reports and blueprints to change the health service published since 2001 and by the lack of implementation of those documents. He said parking health service reforms while dealing with financial challenges was not an option.
Fine Gael health spokesman Dr James Reilly said it was incumbent on the Minister to seek her savings by tackling waste in the HSE such as the €1 billion spent on overtime last year rather than cutting frontline services which would only hurt patients. Labour’s health spokeswoman Jan O’Sullivan said the “savage cutbacks” which would result from a €1 billion cut in the health budget would have a devastating impact on frontline services and were unacceptable. She called on Ms Harney to go.
Sinn Féin’s health spokesman Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin said the level of cuts threatened by Ms Harney would devastate the public health system and cost lives. He added that the cuts were being forecast despite massive waste in the system.
“Today I received a reply from the HSE to my Dáil question to the Minister on the decision of the HSE to rent privately owned premises in Carlow town for €365,000 per annum (€1,000 per day) for a primary care centre, even though the HSE has its own premises and land available at the town’s St Dympna’s Hospital. The HSE defends its waste of taxpayers’ money on the basis that, while space is available at St Dympna’s ‘it would not meet with the requirements of the public-private partnership process’,” he said.
Siptu’s acting national health organiser Paul Bell warned if cuts of €1 billion were enforced they would hit home help, mental health and elective surgery and would affect many hospitals’ viability.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation reiterated its call for a crisis summit on the health services to be convened immediately. Its secretary general Liam Doran said patient care would be severely compromised if that level of cuts was introduced in an uncontrolled fashion.