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Underwriting private hospitals
by Ken Corla

Last June Community Voice revealed that the long promised provision of a scanner for Connolly Hospital was being long-fingered by the HSE as part of the deal to have a private (co-located) hospital built on the hospital grounds. As part of the negotiations with the developer, Mount Carmel Medical Group, it was agreed that the private hospital would provide the scanner which could then be rented for use by public patients in Connolly Hospital. The matter was again raised by local Labour Party TD, Joan Burton during a special adjournment debate before the Dáil closed for its summer holidays.

Speaking in the Dáil Deputy Burton said, “Connolly Hospital is being forced to wait again for at least three more years for vital diagnostic and imaging equipment, including an MRI scanner, because the HSE has taken a decision in principle to wait until after a proposed new private hospital is built and opened on the hospital grounds under the Minister for Health and Children's controversial private hospital co-location scheme.”

According to the deputy “Mount Carmel group is insisting it should have the exclusive rights to imaging, particularly as it pertains to MRI scanners, in order that the public hospital cannot acquire such a facility. The public hospital will therefore have to pay for the services provided by the private hospital. Not only will the private hospital receive all the tax breaks and other lucrative incentives from Government, it will be provided with an income stream from the sale of services to the public hospital.”

As a result of these negotiations, it will be at least three years before these facilities will now be available to patients in Dublin 15 despite the fact that they were promised over nine years ago. Mary Harney, Minister for Health

“In the meantime, thousands of patients in Connolly Hospital will be ferried by ambulance or taxi and accompanied by ambulance and nursing staff to Beaumont Hospital, the Mater Hospital, the new private hospital in Hermitage or the Bon Secours to have necessary imaging undertaken,” said Deputy Burton. “The cost to Connolly Hospital will outweigh the capital cost of buying and using a scanner and facilitating the hospital's teams by providing full diagnostic equipment. The situation in question is an extraordinary feature of life at Connolly Hospital and is inefficient and cruel to many of its patients. On ideological grounds, the Government appears to have decided that public patients at Connolly Hospital who have paid their taxes cannot have vital services because the private hospital wants a lucrative element of private medicine,” she said.

Replying, the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Mary Wallace TD praised the excellence and hard work of staff at Connolly Hospital. “As a former staff member of the hospital, there is no doubt about the wonderful work that occurs therein.” However this was about as positive as Minister Wallace got in her reply. While she may have been a former staff member there she wasn’t prepared to let that sway her in meeting the long promised requirements of her former hospital colleagues.

In a classic example of political buck-passing she said “when Connolly Hospital identified its capital requirements for 2008 - 2009 to the HSE, an MRI scanner was not among the hospital's immediate capital priorities. The HSE has indicated that there is no waiting list for MRI services at Connolly Hospital. The clinical requirements of the hospital's patients for MRI services are currently being met through Beaumont Hospital or via the purchase of private capacity.”

In other words as long as the hospital is obliged to ferry thousands of patients to private hospitals for scanning it will not have a waiting list. Neither can it be deemed to have a need for the equipment itself – even though the cost of transporting patients and paying private operators for the scanning service is far greater than providing the service in-house.

In fact if there wasn’t a demand for such a service why then are Mount Carmel insisting that they should be allowed to spend the money on providing it?

It makes the recent statement of Minister Mary Harney that “the Government will not underwrite any of the co-location hospitals” seem very hollow indeed.

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