Private clinics operating out of Portlaoise hospital
Five private clinics are operating in Portlaoise hospital according to figures from the HSE
FIGURES have just come to light that five private clinics are operating in Portlaoise hospital.
The information, on private clinics operating from publicly funded hospitals was supplied by the HSE in response to a Parliamentary Question from Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín TD.
In all, Deputy Tóibín was informed there are over 300 private clinics operating on the grounds of public hospitals across the country.
Deputy Tóibín said: “Two months ago, I told the Dáil about how consultants were creating private firms to read scans and were using public waiting lists to funnel work through rostering to their own private companies. There are over 300 private clinics operating in public hospitals at the moment. This needs to be examined properly.”
“The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) has serious questions to answer. On one hand we are seeing private patients being treated in private clinics operating in public hospitals with the use of public equipment. On the other hand, we have a situation where 300,000 public patients have been treated in private hospitals since 2017 at a cost to the taxpayer, according to further data supplied to Aontú. The annual cost of this treatment is now €100 Million.”
“What we have here is either a massive inability to deliver services through the public system, or else the slow privatisation of our health service. The HSE have proven that they cannot be trusted with managing tax-payer money. The decisions they are making do not add up, economically.
“In recent years they introduced a recruitment freeze on nurses as a means of saving money. They stopped employing nurses at a time when we had close to a million people on hospital waiting lists. This freeze forced hospitals to avail of recruitment agencies/agency nurses to staff their wards - this cost more per hour of work than it would have to just employ nurses directly.
“The public health service is being funded and paid to do a job - but more and more they are found to be using public money to pay the private sector to do the job for them. It would make more sense for the government to actually invest in and increase capacity in public hospitals rather than paying private entities to accommodate public patients,” said Deputy Tóibín.
