Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has said she wants to see a reduced reliance on the National Treatment Purchase Fund insourcing for Health Service Executive hospitals and on private work to cut waiting lists.
She told the Oireachtas Select Committee on Health that there needs to be a move away from the dependency on this model to fully use the internal underutilised capacity Ireland has within the core health system.
"This is how we can safely reduce the reliance on the model of additional funding to manage our lists," she said.
Minister MacNeill said that due to her concerns about the NTPF insourcing model, she asked the HSE chief executive to carry out a review across the system.
She told the Committee she expects this to be completed shortly.
It follows recent controversies by some hospitals on the use of these funds.
The minister said that a key limiting factor on the ability of the system to deliver more services, is that the physical and digital infrastructure are poor.
In 2022, Ireland had 291 hospital beds per 100,000 people (excluding nursing home beds) while the EU average is 516. In Germany, there are 766 beds per 100,000.
She told the committee that this year's budget has prioritised extra staffing and money to expand the health infrastructure to increase capacity.
The Minister said that at the end of April, there were 25,661 more staff working in the health service.
She told the Select Committee on Health that this was a 35.3% increase since 2020, excluding disability funding.
The minister said that recruitment has been slower this year than she would like and there is a commitment to fund an extra 6,100 staff to 133,305.
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The Committee also heard that spending on agency staff continues to rise and last year the bill came to €734m.
The Department of Health also said that the health system will not have fully digital patient records for six more years.
This is an EU Digital target.
The minister was asked by Labour Party Health Spokesperson Marie Sherlock which hospital she was referring to when she said that it only saw a 3% increase in overall activity from a 36% in workforce and a real expenditure increase of 42%.
Minister MacNeill told the committee it was St Vincent's University Hospital, but she added that the issues were complex and hospitals themselves may be better placed to explain the factors.
