One private company received more than €54 million from the Health Service Executive in a 27-month period to the end of March for providing services to tackle waiting lists in public hospitals, new official figures show.
A report provided by the HSE to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health on Friday evening shows that one company, EHF 29 Limited, received €54.636 million between January 2023 and March 2025. The company has an address in Cork and official filings show it is largely owned by two doctors.
The HSE report says three vendors – EHF 29 Limited, Rosata Recruitment and Totally Healthcare – “relate definitively and almost exclusively to insourcing activity” and received a combined amount of €71 million over the period.
HSE chief Bernard Gloster in a report to the Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill earlier this week said that overall in the 27-month period close to €100 million had been spent on engaging external companies that use HSE-owned facilities and equipment after normal working hours – a practice known as insourcing. He said in many cases companies employed existing health service staff as part of initiatives to reduce public waiting lists.
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Mr Gloster told the Minister that 83 serving or former health staff were acting as directors in 148 companies providing what are known as insourcing and outsourcing (where private hospital facilities are used) arrangements to reduce waiting lists.
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The HSE on Friday evening provided to the Oireachtas committee details on payments made to third parties who provided insourcing as well as outsourcing services over the 27-month period to March.
It said another company, Rosata Recruitment, received more than €10 million and a third, Totally Healthcare, received more than €5 million.
EHF29 Ltd, on its website, says it was “founded with the specific objective of eliminating waiting times for people awaiting treatment or diagnostics in the Irish health service”.
“We provide bespoke, cost-effective, high-quality wait-list initiatives. We use only Irish-based, fully qualified healthcare professionals.
“We are extremely proud of the work we have done helping the HSE reduce waiting lists.”
Annual accounts for EHF 29 show individuals identified as Clodagh Ryan and Ken Walsh each own 43 per cent of the company, through another entity known as EHF 35 Limited.
Ms Ryan and Mr Walsh are identified in official filings as doctors.
Accounts for 2023 show that EHF 29 Limited had recorded an annual profit of €2.39 million for the year.
The company had total assets of more than €4.15 million.
The HSE breakdown on payments made to individual companies providing insourcing services was sought by Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane at a meeting of the Oireachtas committee on Wednesday.
Mr Cullinane told The Irish Times on Friday that he was very concerned that three insourcing companies received more than €70 million and one of these received more than €50 million.
He said the HSE had identified that insourcing posed risks and should be wound down.
Mr Cullinane said he was concerned that insourcing was allowed to be used in public hospitals as a means of managing waiting lists without adequate checks and balances.
Mr Gloster told the Oireachtas committee that “in waiting-list management we have developed an over-reliance on insourcing to supplement core activity”.
The HSE chief defined insourcing as the practice of engaging external companies or third-party providers to deliver services often outside of normal working hours using HSE-owned facilities and equipment.
“In many cases, these providers may employ or subcontract staff who are already directly employed by the HSE, effectively re-engaging internal staff through a separate commercial arrangement, typically at premium rates,” he is expected to say.
“It is not the use of standard overtime within employment contract arrangements of existing staff, which is a different form of insourcing.”
He said he had proposed to the Minister that insourcing as a means of tackling waiting lists in public hospitals be phased out by the end of June next year.
