HEALTH MINISTER JENNIFER Carroll MacNeill has said some regional health services are overspending on payments to staff and that is why they have had their day-to-day spending powers stripped.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speaking to The Journal, MacNeill said that some regions are performing better than others when it comes to managing budgets.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Public Expenditure Minister Jack Chambers told The Irish Times\u2019 Inside Politics podcast this week that four Health Service Executive (HSE) regions were \u201cgoing to lose autonomy on day-to-day spending and there\u2019ll be much greater controls introduced on all elements of pay and non-pay spending\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
MacNeill said that she and Chambers are \u201cvery much at one on this\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole health service has experienced a fairly significant increase in demand this year, particularly in our emergency departments, but nothing like the level of demand that would match the spending increases on pay,\u201d she said of the four regions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chambers said there would be \u201cmuch greater centralisation\u201d of financial management, despite recent initiatives to decentralise decision-making across the HSE.<\/p>\n
MacNeill said today that some things, like demand, are beyond the government\u2019s control but that spending on recruitment is not one of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can control who we recruit and when we can recruit them. We control how we use agency and how we reduce agency,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose things are within control, as are the non-pay savings. So those are the areas that demonstrate real concern to myself and Minister Chambers because they demonstrate a lack of grip of the organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said that the HSE \u201ccan\u2019t just keep adding more and more people to the health system\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have to be deployed and used to do better across everywhere. And there are some regions that really are doing that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dublin North East and the Midwest were two such examples MacNeill mentioned.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are much closer to managing their pay budget than the other regions that are not, which are the Southwest, Mid-Leinster, Southeast, and to a slightly lesser extent the Northwest,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t reduce your agency cost, you can\u2019t hire other people. If you hire nothing but expensive consultants, you can\u2019t hire other people,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to balance your overall pay budget.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added that the health system \u201chad been well stabilised\u201d by former HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster and her predecessor as head of the Department of Health, Stephen Donnelly, last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis year is different, and we are so determined not to let it go back to the way that it was. And so that\u2019s why we feel the need to take additional steps at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sinn F\u00e9in\u2019s health spokesperson David Cullinane said the stripping of budgetary control from the four regions \u201cwould represent a serious setback for regionalisation\u201d and warned the government against \u201cscapegoating regional management for the consequences of unrealistic budgets, rigid recruitment controls and rising demand\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cBarely a year into the new structures, this reform is already beginning to crack,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of making regionalisation work, the government is now threatening to take power and responsibility back from four of the six regions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere must be accountability at regional level and proper oversight of public spending. However, the minister for public expenditure cannot simply blame regional managers for problems created by government policy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HEALTH MINISTER JENNIFER Carroll MacNeill has said some regional health services are overspending on payments to staff and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11229,179007,3267,2120,61,60,1421,43,10298,4996],"class_list":["post-621287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-budgets","tag-hospital-staff","tag-hospitals","tag-hse","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jennifer-carroll-macneill","tag-news","tag-overspending","tag-spending"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}