Private hospital deal could cost €700m, the ‘cost of a new hospital’ – Cork consultant
The deal brokered between the Department of Health and 19 private hospitals does not represent value for money for the tax payer and, as it stands, could pay for a new hospital, a Cork hospital consultant has said.
Dr Cróchán O’Sullivan, a consultant cardiologist at the Bons Secours private hospital in Cork City, said the deal to take over the use of 19 private hospitals for the duration of the public health emergency could cost as much as €700 million, the price of a new hospital.
The Department of Health has agreed to pay private hospitals €115 million per month to use their facilities to treat Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 patients during the public health emergency.
Doctors working exclusively in private hospitals were also encouraged to sign up to a temporary contract that would allow them to treat public patients but would exclude any private work. Most have refused to sign to date.
So far only 130 of around 600 ‘private only’ hospital consultants across the country have agreed to sign up to the ‘public only’ type contract - 60 of whom are at the Bon Secours in Cork.
Dr O’Sullivan is one of the minority, who reluctantly signed the Type A contract last week to work for the HSE until September.
“As a citizen this is a bad deal for the taxpayer. It’s going to go down as one of the worst deals in Irish history. There’s no ceiling on the amount that can be paid; it’s basically an open cheque book for private hospitals,” Dr O’Sullivan told the Irish Examiner.
The Department of Health, he said, panicked when it saw what was going on in Europe and rushed into the agreement with private hospitals.
“For the taxpayer it isn’t a good deal. They are paying €115 million per month and that’s before consultant salaries are taken into account,” Dr O’Sullivan said.
“We’re looking at a cost of over €700 million between now and September when you factor in consultant salaries. For that you would get a new cath lab in Waterford or a new accident and emergency department. You’d build a state of the art new elective hospital in Cork for that,” he added.
‘Private only’ doctors, he said, are being treated “very unfairly”. He pointed out that a type B contract, offering a mix of public and private work, was currently advertised for Tallaght hospital, a public facility, in Dublin.
“The Department of Health is refusing to offer type B contracts in the private sector for ideological reasons,” he said.
Dr O’Sullivan added that the arrangement would also cost him in the short term, as his new public salary of €6,000 per month would not meet his monthly overheads of €10,000 for his now empty private practice.
He added he is retaining his secretarial staff contrary to the advice of the Department of Health to let his staff go: “If I let my staff go who is going to do the follow up? The HSE hasn’t given me a secretary to arrange follow up. So they haven’t thought this through at all.”
Around 3,500 patients have been treated in private hospitals under the arrangement to date.
Last week Health Minister Simon Harris said the cost of the deal will be subject to scrutiny by the Comptroller and Auditor General and possibly the Committee of Public Accounts.
