HSE predicts budget overspend this year but ‘won’t cut services’
THE cost of running the HSE will exceed its allocated budget this year, according to its own national service plan.
It comes despite a recruitment freeze for most staff categories and cuts to agency workers and overtime.
But the HSE has insisted it will not cut back any more on services.
Its National Service Plan (NSP) – published this week – confirmed ‘the cost of running our existing services at current levels over the next 12 months is likely to exceed the 2024 funding allocation’.
It continued: ‘In addition to developing more effective service delivery approaches to enable greater activity to meet rising demand, we will also seek other opportunities to minimise the level of financial deficit.’
In the document’s foreword, HSE CEO Bernard Gloster wrote: ‘We will have a significant focus in 2024 on productivity. I am conscious the traditional use of this concept might be in the negative and I want to be clear that our mandate from the [Health] Minister is to use it in the positive and not to cut services. By that, I mean delivering additional activity from better use of the resources we have, to further meet the needs of the people we are privileged to serve.
‘We know that with the highest ever workforce in the history of the HSE, modern methods of care and the use of technology, that productivity can be a constant and positive improvement.’
Speaking on RTÉ’s Six One, Mr Gloster added: ‘We have been very clear since about last October that the costs we were carrying last year simply are too much of a pressure on the level of funding we have, but I think we have a very clear approach to dealing with that. The one absolute commitment that we have from Government is that would not involve the cutting of services.’
David Cullinane, Sinn Féin’s health spokesman, said the plan was ‘a work of fiction’ and the HSE has not been funded ‘to stand still, never mind address challenges of waiting lists and overcrowding’ or to deliver meaningful reform.