Hospitals around the State which are in the red will not in future be given official approval for the appointment of additional medical consultants, under new measures which have been put in place by the Health Service Executive.
The board of the HSE has been told by its senior management that "new consultant posts have been put on hold except for agencies which can confirm their ability to manage their services within the 2005 allocation".
Consultant groups have maintained that, given the number of health agencies currently in financial difficulties, the new policy will affect patient care.
Minister for Health Mary Harney and senior health service management have both given assurances in recent months that frontline services for patients should not be hit by any cutbacks this year.
The new HSE policy will only apply to new or additional consultant posts sought by hospitals and regional health services. Replacement positions for consultants who retire or resign will not be affected.
A spokesman for the HSE said last night that new posts deemed critical or urgent would also still be approved.
The new policy was developed over the summer, and to date no hospital has been refused sanction for an additional post.
The HSE is unable at this stage to estimate how many additional consultant posts which have been earmarked for establishment this year will be affected by the new policy.
Although new official figures show that hospitals around the country recorded a collective financial deficit of €104 million in the first six months of the year, the HSE has denied that the new policy on approving additional consultant positions has been drawn up as a cost-saving initiative. A spokesman for the HSE said last night that the new measure was a practical one.
He said that in future hospitals would not receive approval for the appointment of additional consultants unless they had sufficient theatre facilities or bed capacity in place to allow the person appointed to work effectively.
The Irish Hospital Consultants' Association said last night that it was outraged by the new HSE policy.
Donal Duffy, assistant secretary general of the IHCA, said the new policy meant that senior medical positions in hospitals which had been considered a necessity would not go ahead because of a lack of money.
He said this was "a budget-centred and not a patient-centred policy".
New figures which have been published by the HSE indicate that virtually all major hospitals in Dublin are facing financial deficits for the year. Hospitals in the northeast and west are also in difficulties.
Official figures for the first six months of the year show that hospitals in Dublin were €47 million in the red.
Outside the Dublin area the most significant reported deficits arise in the North East (€10.5 million) and Western areas (€9.1 million).
It is understood the HSE is planning to inject more than €70 million in supplementary funding into the hospital sector later in the year, although some administrators are understood to have argued that this will not be enough.
"The National Hospitals Office deficit will be managed through tight expenditure control in the second half of the year and phasing of development funding," the board of the HSE was told by its management in a report in June.
