The Health Service Executive (HSE) has to live within its budget, Minister for Health Mary Harney warned yesterday.
She was reacting to this week's decision by the HSE to place a temporary ban on recruitment to contain costs and balance its budget by the year end. Latest figures indicate the HSE had recorded a deficit of more than €240 million at the end of July.
Ms Harney said she had no intention of going to the Dáil and seeking more money for the HSE this year. She said the health budget was a very generous €15 billion. "The HSE have to live within their budget and I'm not going to go into the Dáil and have a supplementary estimate," she said.
The HSE was now, as a prudent organisation, making decisions to ensure it lived within its budget, she said.
She dismissed suggestions that patients would suffer as a result of the ban on recruitment, including of frontline staff.
Ms Harney defended the plan to pay bonuses to senior HSE managers who handled the transition from the health board to the HSE system, despite the cutbacks.
"That's a wider public pay policy issue. That applies to people that work in all public organisations, and every review group has recommended this and I strongly support the concept of performance-related pay," she said.
The monthly meeting of the HSE board heard that hospitals had overspent their budgets by €139 million while the primary, community and continuing care sector, which includes the demand-led drug payment scheme, overran its budget by €97 million. The corporate section of the HSE recorded an overrun of €9 million.
Figures given to the Department of Health for the eight months to August show the HSE overspent by €222 million.