The State fund responsible for reducing waiting times at public hospitals has suspended all funding for private services at Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) hospitals under “insourcing arrangements” over concerns at the group.
The move follows the controversy around a hospital consultant who allegedly breached HSE guidelines by referring patients he was seeing in his public practice to weekend clinics he was operating separately.
The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) has suspended all funding for ”insourcing arrangements” at the children’s hospital group on foot of concerns raised about how such schemes have been operated in the past.
The NTPF aims to cut waiting times by paying private practices to treat patients on public waiting lists.
Insourcing is where public hospital facilities and staff, such as in CHI, are funded by the NTPF to provide additional services, outside core working hours, to treat those waiting longest for care.
The NTPF receives more than €200 million each year to pay for the treatment in the public and private systems for patients on long waiting lists.
On Tuesday, the fund said that following “serious concerns” raised over an internal report drawn up by the children’s hospital group in 2021 - but not published or circulated - it had “immediately placed a temporary pause on all insourcing work with CHI”.
It said it had initiated “a comprehensive review of all insourcing work with CHI to gather the necessary assurances regarding compliance, value for money and appropriate use of NTPF funding mechanisms”.
The NTPF does not provide details of payments made to individual hospitals so the amount provided to the CHI group over recent years is not known publicly.
The fund said the key criteria covered for insourcing programmes include that the funding is targeted at the longest waiting public patients.
It also stipulates that all insourcing activities are being carried out strictly outside of core activity and are not displacing or overlapping with services already funded under the HSE’s national service plan.
No costs already funded by the HSE, including capital or core-funded staff costs, are allowed to be included in NTPF reimbursement claims.
All staffing arrangements must be line with public pay policy and comply with HSE consolidated pay scales for core hours, overtime and premium payments.
The NTPF said that it was ”liaising with CHI at the highest level“ to obtain and review these assurances and is in close contact with the Department of Health and the HSE.
