UNIVERSITY Hospital Limerick earned more than €67million in fees from private patient care over the period of 2022 and 2023, placing it second in the country, just behind Cork University Hospital, in terms of the private funding take.
The extent of the funding may raise alarm bells for the hospital’s finances with the new Public-Only Consultants Contracts scheme due to be fully operational by the end of this year.
According to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information by the Irish Times, University Hospital Limerick earned €31.2million from treating 23,464 private patients in 2023. It earned €36 million the previous year in the same way.
Under the new contracts, which aim to have consultants only undertake private work outside of the public system, this stand of finance would be largely lost to the UHL and the other hospitals in UL Hospitals, who all have a private funding take, albeit to a much lesser extent.
Under the new public-only contracts, consultants can be asked to work between 8am and 10pm Monday to Friday and 8am to 6pm on Saturdays as part of their core 37-hour week. All private work they carry out will have to take place outside rostered hours and away from the public facility.
Latest figures indicate that more than 60 per cent of consultants nationally are on the new contract as of the end of November 2024, but it is understood progress in numbers signing up at UL Hospitals Group is behind the national trend.
At a presentation to the Oireachtas Public Health Committee on the matter back in May, consultants’ representatives said their members had concerns about the new contracts.
Irish Medical Organisation chief executive Susan Clyne said at the time that “it is not realistic to infer that the health service will see tangible benefits if consultants are consistently rostered outside ‘normal’ working hours”.
“With the deficits in our workforce, there is no room for manoeuvre – we are quite literally adopting a policy of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Asked by Senator Martin Conway why so few UHL consultants had signed up to the new work contract allowing them be rostered at weekends, Ms Clyne said she presumed it was possibly due to a “lack of trust in how the hospital will be able to implement the terms of that contract”.
The HSE has stated that it is likely the funding shortfall from the phasing out of private care in public facilities will affect the hospitals’ finances and provision will have to be made for this from public funds.
