Social justice groups warned today that co-locating private and public hospitals will bring further health-service inequality and undermine fundamental values.
The Adelaide Hospital Society and the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice heavily criticised the Government's health care reform plans in a new policy document - The Irish Health Service: Vision, Values, Reality, published this morning.
Both organisations are calling for health care reform to include a halt to privatisation, the wide extension of medical-card eligibility, greater medical accountability and a political commitment to end health inequality.
"From a long-term perspective, a particularly worrying element of this proposal is that it promotes the perception and the reality that health care is just another commodity to be bought and sold," Dr Fergus O'Ferrall, director of the Adelaide Hospital Society, said.
"The building of private hospitals on the grounds of public hospitals would entrench the existing two-tier system of hospital care and make it all the more difficult in the future to bring about change in that system," he said.
The aim of the Government's hospital co-location plan is to enable private patients to move from public hospitals to private facilities on the same site, thereby freeing up significant capacity for public patients.
With around 2,500 private beds in the public hospital sector, the co-location project is intended transfer up to 1,000 such beds to private facilities over a period of five years.
Dr O'Ferrall said although the building of private hospitals on public health land would be built only with the backing of public subsidies, the State would not be a co-owner of them.
PA