A cross-border healthcare scheme will be reinstated to help relieve hospital waiting list pressures in Northern Ireland, the North’s Minister for Health Mike Nesbitt has said.
The Minister told MLAs he wants to proceed “at pace” with work on getting the reimbursement scheme up and running.
Before Brexit, the European Union’s cross-border healthcare directive was used to reimburse patients in Northern Ireland who were diagnosed with a clinical need and received treatment in another EU country.
This was later replaced by a direct scheme with the Republic of Ireland, which closed in 2022 due to lack of funding.
Hospital waiting lists in Northern Ireland are currently the worst in the UK.
Mr Nesbitt was allocated £215 million (€252 million) in the recently agreed 2025/26 budget to attempt to deal with waiting list pressures.
During ministerial question time at the Northern Ireland Assembly, Sinn Féin MLA Órlaithí Flynn asked Mr Nesbitt if he has considered reintroducing a cross-border scheme.
He said: “I most certainly have, yes.”
He continued: “Tackling waiting lists is an Executive priority, I have no difficulty with that because I agree with it,” he said.
Mr Nesbitt outlined a breakdown for the proposed £215 million spend to tackle waiting lists. He said a “cocktail” of measures will be needed.
Reinstatement of a cross-border scheme will be among a range of measures considered, he said.
“We will be doing all that at pace, and I will be meeting officials in the coming days to look at an options paper they are preparing for me in that regard.”
Mr Nesbitt reminded MLAs that through the scheme patients would have to pay for their treatments in advance and then would be reimbursed by his department.
He said there is an “equity issue” at play, and he wants to see if this can be mitigated for people who ”actually can’t afford or can’t find the means to find the money for the up-front payment”.
“The cross-border scheme, I am being told, if we start next week, it could be another six to eight weeks before we are putting it in place where we start the machinery rocking,” he said.
“That is getting well into this financial year and, like people who are on a waiting list, I am pretty impatient to get this done.”
- PA
