A figure of €14.2m was paid out in one year to such companies, when the cases could have been treated under the public system, the leader of Aontú, Peadar Tóibín, alleged. The Meath West TD said it was a “major conflict of interest.”
University Hospital Limerick (UHL) “was found not to have conducted an open procurement process with such transfers, he said.
Today’s News in 90 seconds – 7th May 2025
In one case, a consultant created a private firm to read scans and “used the hospital public waiting lists to then funnel work through rostering into his own private company,” he alleged under Dáil privilege.
He added: “It is an incredible situation and a major conflict of interest for anybody in a public role to be doing this in relation to their own businesses.
“The Minister must admit that we cannot allow anybody on the public payroll to be in a position where they are creating a private company and funnelling public work to their own private company.”
“We are actually hearing of this happening in real time at the moment. Hospitals have work coming at them at a fierce rate,” he said.
Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, confirmed a probe is under way by the Office of the Chief Internal Auditor to establish the extent to which private companies were used to provide additional services.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health said: “At the request of the Minister for Health, the Health Service Executive (HSE) CEO, Bernard Gloster, initiated a detailed survey of all insourcing activity within the HSE, with assistance from sections such as Finance, Internal Audit, HR and Access/Integration functions.
“The HSE CEO has also issued an instruction that all insourcing, where existing staff are hired/engaged/paid by a separate entity to work on initiatives in their own place or type of work, must be paused. Only insourcing where the HSE directly engages its own staff through payroll (overtime) can continue until the survey is completed.
“The ultimate aim of this work is to move beyond the dependency on insourcing / outsourcing in the HSE, in favour of planned stabilised rostering of all staff,” the spokesperson said.
Two private entities were owned or part-owned by employees of University Hospital Limerick, and a third was owned by an HSE employee at another hospital, Mr Tóibín alleged in the Dáil.
“There are delayed diagnoses, delayed treatments, and more negative outcomes as a result of this,” he said. There are not enough public beds within the system, he noted, while investment was clearly not getting to the front line.
He demanded an end to the recruitment embargo effectively in place in the healthcare sector, in order to improve throughput in a situation where one hospital had a backlog of 960 biopsies.
Minister for Public Expenditure, Jack Chambers, said the HSE has initiated a detailed survey of all “insourcing” activity within the HSE.
The review of insourcing across the HSE was also due to broader concerns about how it is operating, and value for money considerations, he said.
Minister for Public Expenditure, Jack Chambers, said the matters raised were “extremely serious” and needed to be “properly and thoroughly followed through” by the HSE.
Under initiatives to reduce waiting lists, the HSE can outsource to private hospitals under the surgical services framework and the private provider framework, he noted.
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