Committee to hear HSE €319m over budget but 'variance' less than last year
The HSE will tomorrow confirm that it is €319m over budget.
The Oireachtas Health Committee will be told, however, this is substantially less of a budgetary “variance” than this time last year.
The comparable figure for the same period in 2018 was €636m.
HSE CEO Paul Reid will tell committee members that “the provision of safe services . . . whilst operating within the funding provided to us continues to be a significant challenge”.
He will say that there is an ever increasing level of demand for HSE services due to our growing and ageing population “as well as on-going societal and economic change”.
He will say the greatest cost pressures include providing residential placements to people with intellectual disabilities and specialist emergency acute hospital care.
And he will say this is “particularly in the context of an aging population with increasingly complex needs”.
The committee will also hear that the HSE is putting an extra €26m into its winter planning to improve “overall patient flow from community, through the acute hospital and back into the community”.
Some €19.2m of this funding will go into Home Care Packages, Improving
Access to Nursing Home Support Scheme (Fair Deal) and Transitional Care Beds for patients awaiting nursing home places.
“The initiatives have in fact been in place since October in preparation for the anticipated winter surge and have enabled the system to respond,” Mr Reid will say in his opening address.
The committee will also be told the HSE is currently employing 138,080 personnel, equating to 119,473 Whole Time Equivalents (WTE).
“Our continued growth is important in the context of our overarching pay and numbers Strategy,” Mr Reid says.
“We have and continue to fill approved and funded development posts in order to maintain and enhance key services for patients and their families.
“In parallel we are working to ensure that levels of agency, overtime and pay costs, which reached unaffordable levels by the end of 2018, are brought within what is affordable and sustainable during 2019.”
And he will say: “As we draw to a close in 2019, we will continue to proceed with approved and funded development posts in tandem with the requirement to keep within an affordable funding level that is sustainable both in 2019 and 2020.”
In a recent interview, Mr Reid said the agency is to begin a redundancy scheme next year.
Targets will be, he said, members of the HSE’s bloated management.
