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LAST UPDATE | 14 Jun
THE MINISTER FOR Health has indicated that a version of an unpublished report detailing concerns at Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) may be published this week.
The internal investigation, the details of which were first reported by the Sunday Times and subsequently seen by The Journal and other media outlets, came about after concerns were raised about how waiting list initiatives were being carried out at a hospital run by CHI.
It detailed how a consultant was paid €35,800 by the hospital after money was received from the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) to help cut long waiting lists.
The HSE has referred the report to gardaí and the Irish Medical Council.
Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has previously called for a redacted version of the report to be published.
Speaking on Newstalk’s Anton Savage Show this morning, the Health Minister said she had not published the report after checking with the Attorney General because she has “no legal basis” to do so.
“This was an internal human resources-type report going into some very serious cultural issues, and the people who participated in it, nurses, junior doctors and so on, they participated in it on that basis, in a confidential way,” she said.
Carroll MacNeill said the report reflects what some staff said in confidence and that some of them would be identifiable
In the normal course, you’d never publish something like that, but the issues in this are of such seriousness that in the broader public interest, a version of it must be published.
She said that CHI are reflecting on how to publish the report “responsibly” so that it “tells the maximum story behind it and the steps of what has been taken next”.
When asked if she knows when this will be published, she said: “I suspect it will be this week.”
The Fine Gael TD said it is important that the people “who might have given descriptions about what they were feeling and perhaps some of the pressures they felt” are appropriately protected.
On hospital governance, Carroll MacNeill said she had a lot of questions about the different governance structures across the country.
“Ireland is a small country. It’s five and a half million people. We spend a very significant amount of our taxpayers money on health, quite appropriately, but we need to make sure that we’re getting the best value for that.”
She said CHI was formed in an effort to create a single entity that would bring Temple Street and St James’s hospitals together, adding that it has “done that and has brought it to a certain point”.
“There’s no question about that, but I do think that there’s very much more work to be done to integrate a single pediatric system.”
Today, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald reiterated calls for the CHI report to be published, telling reporters: “Publish the report. I think the families are so distressed by that has happened to their children and the questions that have arisen. That report needs to be published, and I don’t accept that there would be valid legal argument for not publishing the report.
“If that is the case, she [Jennifer Carroll MacNeill] needs to publish that advice and then find a mechanism to overcome any legal impediment.”
The Minister was also asked whether it was appropriate that CHI are permitted to run the new National Children’s Hospital (NCH). The earliest date that the hospital will now be open to patients is June 2026.
“I think we’ll be reflecting on that sort of policy structure over the next year,” she said, adding that her first concern is that the NCH is opened at the earliest possible date.
She said that there are 140 consultants within CHI, and that these issues have been created from “a very small proportion”.
“I am a parent of a child in CHI, many, many others are and they know that it’s a very good service. It’s very, very functional. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to get deep into these problem areas.”
Last month, Carroll MacNeill appointed two HSE board members to the board of CHI after three of its members resigned following the release of an independent review into children’s hip surgeries at three CHI hospitals.
“I do have another a number of vacancies which I think will need to be filled, and I think we will reflect on that in policy terms over the next number of months,” she said.
She said the Government would keep “a steady focus” on the delivery of services, the implementation of reforms where they need to happen and planning for the NCH.
“But I am watching and managing this very carefully from a medium-term policy perspective,” she added.
The matter of the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) was also raised. The NTPF provides funding for patients on waiting lists to get treatment in both public and private settings.
It pays for clinics to be set up in public hospitals outside of normal working hours, i.e on weekends, wherein staff already working at the hospital are paid additionally to carry out extra work. This is known as “insourcing”.
The NTPF had suspended funding to CHI hospitals over concerns raised in an internal audit, related to an insourcing clinic at the hospital. On Wednesday, it cut funding to another public hospital temporarily after finding ” potential financial irregularities” in relation to NTPF-funded insourcing work.
Carroll MacNeill said that an audit of insourcing that she and HSE chief Bernard Gloster commissioned has been completed and that she expects to see the results “possibly” in the next two to three weeks.
She said the matter needs “very serious and careful analysis”, as does the issue of insourcing more broadly “because of how it intersects with getting the best productivity within the public system”.
“We cannot have a fully public system and also be creating these other incentives. We cannot cut off these other incentives overnight because of the impact on patient care, but by God, we’re going to be weaning ourselves off them.”
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