THE MINISTER for Health, Mary Harney, has defended budget cuts at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Dublin as Fine Gael questioned why €5 million was being spent on a ‘virtual’ new hospital at the Mater site when the existing hospital “is being put under such strain”.
Ms Harney said the 2009 allocation to Crumlin “is €139.6 million, an increase of some 39 per cent over the past five years”, and it included a 3 per cent reduction with “an agreed programme of savings, totalling €6.5 million”. She added that Crumlin “employed 1,650 people at the end of March compared with an approved 1,550. This contributes to its current financial difficulties.”
The hospital is delivering more treatments – “in the first three months of 2009, there were 2,745 treatments for children as inpatients and 3,841 as day cases, an increase of 244 over 2008. Crumlin also had 21,252 attendances at the outpatient department, an increase of 1,041 from the first quarter of last year,” she said.
But Fine Gael health spokesman, Dr James Reilly, said Crumlin “looks after 80 per cent of children’s tertiary needs” and the hospital had increased its activity because of the increasing population.
He asked in the Dáil why the Government was spending “€5 million a year on a virtual new hospital, which no one believes will proceed in the current economic climate, when it is enforcing cutbacks at the very hospital delivering care today?”
But Ms Harney insisted “we need a new hospital badly”. The Government is providing “more than €250 million for the running of three paediatric hospitals in the Dublin area” and the HSE had shown that “a minimum of €25 million per year can be saved in duplication costs by combining the three hospitals”.
A new clinical affairs director, a doctor, will start this week at the HSE and “bringing clinicians further into the management of services such as paediatrics will greatly help to get better value for money and more services for patients”.
Dr Reilly said the comments about clinical directorships were sensible but “they fail to answer the questions of why we are cutting front-line services to children, why the money cannot be found elsewhere and why we are spending money on a virtual hospital when the existing hospital is being put under such strain”.
Ms Harney said the new hospital “does not meet with universal approval, but everyone knows that, were we to establish a paediatric service for the city and country, we would not start from our current position.”
