Health service ‘could need a fresh bailout of €700million’

THE Department of Health may need another bailout, according to reports.

A range of new services reportedly mean the original budget of more than €13billion might be not enough to cover the costs, according to a report in the Sunday Business Post.

Health Minister Leo Varadkar has already secured additional funding for the health service this year but it is understood that the amount needed in the next supplementary budget could be just as much as the last, which was approximately €680million.

The Oireachtas will have to vote in favour of the supplementary budget.

A HSE report released earlier this month gave an indication as to where the budgetary pressures within the health service are currently arising from. The report showed that the HSE ran almost €25million over budget in January. And if this level of overspend were to continue until the end of the year, that would mean that the HSE could be over budget by €300million.

Giving an indication of where the current budgetary pressures lie, the performance report stated that €13million of the deficit is in relation to ‘demand-led’ areas of the Primary Care Reimbursement scheme, State claims, local schemes and pensions.

It stated ‘the sustained exceptional level of delayed discharges, the cost pressures these are causing and the level of management time and capacity taken up with dealing with this issue within our acute and social care services is beyond the level anticipated in the service plan.’

Hospitals will need to reduce their budgets by a minimum of 2 to 2.5 per cent this year to address the deficit in acute services, and Mr Varadkar has made it clear that he is concerned about the level of agency staff being used, and the higher costs associated with using agency staff.

In one of his first interviews after taking up the post of health almost a year ago, Mr Varadkar said that addressing the HSE’s financial deficit was one of his top priorities – although he warned he wouldn’t find a quick-fix solution.

Last July, he said: ‘If we are running a deficit I don’t think it is possible to just turn that around in the space of a few months but definitely in a full financial year, that would be my intention.’