The Health Service Executive and internal auditors are examining new allegations about the operation of initiatives to tackle waiting lists at Children’s Health Ireland (CHI), the group that runs paediatric hospitals in Dublin.
These include questions about the appropriateness of an arrangement under which it is contended a consultant was paid about €40,000 to treat 40 patients from his public waiting list at a leading private hospital in Dublin in 2018.
Correspondence sent earlier this month to Dáil Public Accounts Committee chairman John Brady, Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill and HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster maintains that staff at CHI set out concerns to management about the appropriateness of this outsourcing initiative. The correspondence, sent anonymously, maintains that staff concerns were ignored.
These allegations are separate from those set out in an unpublished internal CHI report, leaked in May, which said a doctor had been paid €35,800 for seeing patients at special clinics paid for by the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) between September 2020 and March 2021. The fund is a publicly funded body which buys care for patients on long waiting lists.
This report questioned whether these special NTPF clinics were needed and suggested the children could have been treated using other capacity in the public system.
The Health Service Executive referred aspects of the CHI internal report to the gardaí in June. That examination of the report has been completed and a criminal investigation is now under way.
The new correspondence, dated July 7th, raises broadly similar issues about the alleged referral of patients to the private hospital in 2018. It contends that other consultants in the public system or private sector could have seen these patients.
The NTPF said it had received a funding proposal about treating 40 paediatric patients in a specific speciality in a private hospital in 2018, but this had not been authorised.
Children’s Health Ireland also said there was no such NTPF initiative in 2018. CHI did not address whether other forms of State funding to cut waiting lists could have been used to fund any such private hospital treatment in 2018 or whether any staff had raised concerns at the time.
The Irish Times understands that the HSE regional organisation for Dublin and the Midlands has started inquiries into the new allegations.
The NTPF said it had reviewed the letter and understood it had been referred to the Health Service Executive’s national office of protected disclosures and shared with the HSE internal audit.
“We expect that HSE internal audit will examine all relevant matters in its work,” it said.
The correspondence also highlights an email purportedly written by a CHI official in December 2020 which appears to set out an arrangement to bypass HSE pay structures and NTPF rules against paying consultants directly for seeing patients treated under waiting list initiatives. This involved urging a doctor to bill for just over two hours per patient, as this would equate to the amount paid by the National Treatment Purchase Fund.
The NTPF said it had never been told about this email previously.
Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane said Children’s Health Ireland must refer all allegations to gardaí. He said CHI cannot operate to a different threshold to the Health Service Executive on what merited being sent to gardaí for investigation.
CHI said in a statement: “Children’s Health Ireland will not comment on individual staff members. There was no NTPF-funded initiative for 40 patients in 2018.”
