Scrapping private practice in public hospitals to cost HSE €140m this year, PAC told

The abolition of private practice in public hospitals will cost the Health Service Executive about €140 million this year, it has told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee. At a hearing on Thursday, the HSE also said the use of more expensive agency staff would cost about €800 million. It said it was seeking to reduce reliance on personnel provided by employment agencies. HSE chief executive Anne O’Connor also said it had introduced a new policy under which consultants would have to submit claims for additional work carried out within a three-month period. The committee questioned the HSE about revelations in its annual accounts that one consultant was paid more than €900,000 last year. More than €300,000 related to work carried out in previous years. READ MOREThe HSE revealed that the consultant who was paid over €900,000 was based at Cavan General Hospital. Eoghan Kenny of the Labour Party said it was as if the HSE was providing a savings scheme for consultants. He asked how the HSE could properly budget, if consultants could make claims several years later for additional work carried out in the past. In a briefing paper submitted in advance of a hearing on Thursday, the HSE said “the [financial] challenge is increasingly structural rather than operational, reflecting the gap between funded service levels and the cost of delivering current activity and workforce requirements”.It said there would be a significant deficit remaining at the end of the year. The Irish Times reported on Wednesday that new enhanced spending and recruitment controls were to be put in place within days, amid growing concerns in Government at the scale of overspending in the health service. Restrictions on staff recruitment and expenditure were imposed earlier in the year but Ministers have maintained that the deficit has continued to increase.At the end of July the health service was over budget by almost €580 million and this is understood to have increased to nearly €700 million by late August.