The Department of Health is wasting almost £88 million annually on acute hospital beds occupied by patients who should be in other facilities, according to the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association.
The secretary-general of the association, Mr Finbarr Fitzpatrick, said the bill for this year alone represented more than the entire budget for hospital waiting lists since 1993. "The sum of £88 million could clear the present waiting list of 34,000 patients twice over," he said.
He said the Minister for Health, Mr Cowen, had revealed recently that 189 patients occupying acute beds in the Dublin area were unable to find "step-down" facilities. It was "yet another example of the appalling lack of planning in the health services".
These Dublin patients were costing the taxpayer £380,000 a week, at an annual cost of almost £21 million, Mr Fitzpatrick said. "We reckon that the bill for patients who are inappropriately retained in acute hospitals throughout the State is as high as £88 million at 1998 costs."
One Dublin patient had been in an acute bed for two years, at a cost of £220,000, because a "stepdown" bed could not be found. A step-down bed costs about a tenth of the cost of an acute bed, he pointed out.
The situation is set to worsen in the run-up to Christmas, he said, as health boards and hospitals struggle with new legislation which requires them to stay within budget. In the long term it will be affected by the increasingly ageing population.
"It would seem that we will see severe bed closures in the run-up to Christmas because of budgetary overruns.
"There will also probably be very little elective work in the six weeks before and after Christmas," he said.