St James's Hospital in Dublin, the biggest hospital in the country, has apologised for paying over €4.7m for cancer and other services to a radiology company, on its own campus, where 18 directors were members of its staff.
The Public Accounts Committee was told today that there was no public tender process for the services.
The private radiology company rents space on the St James's campus.
Chief Executive Mary Day said it was regretful that declarations of interest were not made by everyone in the commercial company but this was later corrected through HR.
This involved providing over 35,000 diagnostic scans.
Representatives for the hospital, which has over a thousand beds and 5,000 staff, told PAC, that it did not meet the standards expected of it.
The hospital says it was driven by urgent patient needs in cancer in particular, but also in cardiology, to prevent delayed diagnosis and to deliver the best care to patients.
St James's told PAC that the price paid for each diagnostic scan was reasonable and within the pre-set maximum fee set out by the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), which funds waiting list initiatives in public and private hospitals.
Insourcing is whereby the NTPF uses funds to cut public waiting lists by funding extra in-house clinical work in public hospitals, but the hospitals are expected to follow the NTPF rules.
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In its statement to the PAC today, St James's says that it had to respond to "urgent demand" and that in 2024, there were 28 adverse incident reports related to delayed diagnosis, associated with constrained access to diagnostic imaging.
Giving a sense of the time involved in procuring projects, it said that procurement of insourced MRI services took 12 months to finalise through a competitive tender conducted by the HSE.
The Comptroller & Auditor General (G&AG) Seamus McCarthy said that the hospital's income of around €682m a year comes mostly from public funding.
In relation to the €1.44m insourcing, he has said there was no formal contract for services with the company involved.
Also, of the 18 directors of the company, six had not submitted statutory statements of interest for 2024.
The C&AG says the remaining 12 directors had not declared their interest in the company, or the services delivered in their statements of interest.
Separately, in relation to the 2024 accounts, the C&AG found that private health insurers had rejected or were expected to reject claims by St James's for payment of patient charges to the value of almost €400,000.
He says the processing of claims was not within the agreed timelines.
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