Navan hospital has further €900,000 cut from budget

Our Lady"s Hospital in Navan is to have its budget cut by €939,000 for the coming year in a Health Service Executive (HSE) scheme which rewards hospitals for efficiencies but penalises those regarded as being less efficient. The latest cut in the budget for 2009 follows a cut of €1.2 million imposed in the 2008 budget and has been criticised by two local councillors. The payments are decided under a system called 'casemix" which looks at inpatient and day case activity in HSE hospitals and measures efficiency relative to other hospitals in the peer group. Accident and Emergency units are not included in the system. A spokesperson for the HSE said the casemix programme aims to fund hospitals for the patients they actually treat, at a cost per case. 'Hospitals which treat patients at a lower cost than average national hospital cost will be rewarded as they are deemed to treat patients more efficiently, and hospital which treat patients at a higher cost than the national average hospital cost are penalised or fined. Therefore, some hospitals will gain additional funding for efficiency and some hospitals will lose,' the spokesperson said. The HSE said hospitals in the north-east were working to improve the quality and safety of the patient care they deliver as well as to improve its overall efficiency and utilisation of scarce resources. Fianna Fail Cllr Tommy Reilly said that he could not understand the reasoning behind the cut in the budget for Our Lady"s Hospital. 'I am visiting the hospital at the moment (Tuesday) and the staff here are flat out. It looks to me as if all the efforts they make here on behalf of the patients are being penalised. How could the hospital be made run more efficiently when this is the second budgetary cut in the space of a year? I just can"t understand it,' he said. Sinn Fein Cllr Joe Reilly said that the cuts imposed by the HSE would affect the most vulnerable in society. He has asked for a breakdown of the almost €1 million budgetary cut. Meanwhile, there is still no new information on the location for a new regional hospital for the north-east. The HSE said: 'Currently, the North-East Regional Hospital is included at the latter end of the National Development Plan - 2013 and onwards. Navan has been identified as the location of a new regional hospital. No specific site in Navan has yet been selected. 'The focus of current efforts and funding are to progress the restructuring of acute services from five into two hospital sites in the north-east area within the shortest possible timeframe to address the identified service delivery and risk issues.'