The Minister for Health today rejected claims that a €30 million Government fund is an uneconomic way of treating patients facing long delays on waiting lists.
Speaking on RTÉ radio, Mr Martin said the National Purchase Treatment Fund "is an escalation in the scale of private capacity that we are buying in for people who have been waiting a long time on the waiting list."
The first procedures as part of the scheme have begun.
He was responding to criticisms from Mr Donal Duffy, the assistant general secretary of the Irish Hospitals’ Consultants Association, who said there was a serious flaw in the scheme.
Mr Duffy suggested a greater number of patients could be treated if the treatment fund were invested into the public hospital system rather than pay for expensive private procedures, some of which will take place overseas.
Consultants in the Mater Hospital, Dublin, are refusing to co-operate with the scheme. They want the funds directed into the public hospital. The hospital has the longest waiting list in the State of 3,627.
Mr Duffy added that funding difficulties at the Mater could lead to the short-term closure of day wards over the summer.
Mr Martin responded that the reason behind the treatment fund was that hospitals had told him they did not have the capacity to perform extra procedures.
He added there was no additional funding available for the health boards this year and that they would have to manage within their current budgets.
The treatment fund is specifically for adult patients waiting for over a year and children waiting over six months.
Mr Martin was also optimistic that a core plank of the Fianna Fáil pre-election manifesto - the elimination of waiting lists by 2004 - would be achieved.
"By the end of 2004 no public patient will be waiting longer than three months. That is what we want to do, that is the target we are trying to achieve . . . and I hope it will happen," he said.
