THE HEALTH Service Executive was running €145.8 million over budget by the end of March, a new report shows.
The report says some hospitals will not break even in 2012 without significant service reductions.
The HSE’s performance report to the end of March also says that no hospital achieved the target of 95 per cent of patients being discharged or admitted within six hours or 100 per cent admitted within nine hours of registering at the country’s emergency departments.
The hospitals recording the poorest performance were the Mater, Beaumont and Tallaght.
The top-performing emergency departments for speed of admission were St Luke’s in Kilkenny; Kerry; Letterkenny; Portiuncula and St John’s in Limerick.
While hospitals have a target that by the end of September, no adult should wait more than nine months for an elective procedure, at the end of March 3,891 or 7 per cent of adult patients had waited longer than that.
Some 1,550 or 35 per cent of children waiting for an elective procedure, meanwhile, waited more than 20 weeks. This was a decrease of 111 children when compared to February. It is intended no child will have to wait 20 weeks by the end of September this year.
The figures come from the HSE’s March Performance Report which measures performance against the body’s National Service Plan for 2012. The financial position of the HSE is to be discussed at a HSE board meeting tomorrow.
A British-based financial management consultant has been commissioned by Minister for Health James Reilly to review the executive’s capacity to handle its budget of some €14 billion.
Mark Ogden will carry out a review of expenditure and financial controls throughout the executive in addition to the efficacy of its financial systems. Mr Ogden has worked with five National Health Service organisations over 20 years. The survey is expected to start this week and be completed within a fortnight.
The Minister’s spokesman said the findings review would provide greater clarity concerning the executive’s financial position and would feed into additional controls based in the Department of Health. The review forms part of a number of initiatives aimed at addressing overspending in the health service.
Dr Reilly told The Irish Times that the department had also brought in the chief financial officer of St James’s Hospital on secondment to boost its controls.
“He will be ensuring we upgrade things we have electronic systems for income collection.” The Minister added that about 10 per cent of the deficit related to uncollected income, mainly from private patients.
He said there had been a noticeable increase in the number of claims which insurance companies had left “pending” – unpaid while awaiting clarification.
Separate information on HSE waiting lists also published yesterday showed that 27,164 outpatients had waited between one and two years to see a consultant. More than 13,000 waited between two and three years, 4,928 waited between three and four years and 806 had waited over four years to see a consultant.
