Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

On the question of the provision of more beds in the system through the co-location method, under the traditional public service delivery system of going through the various stages of capital programme requirements, it would take between seven and ten years before all the beds could be brought on stream. The purpose is to introduce into the public service delivery system another method of delivery that we believe would be more expeditious. We believe it would be on line more than would be the case with the traditional mechanism. This is one of the reasons the Government was attracted to this particular arrangement.

The second point I would make in response to the Deputy is that it continues to be characterised as an effort to bring in a two-tier health service when the opposite is the case. The whole purpose is to, first, bring beds on stream more expeditiously than would otherwise be the case and, second, by means of the various service agreements that would be entered into, these arrangements and facilities would be available to all patients, not simply to private patients. As the Deputy will be aware, under the system currently in place there are public and private beds in public hospitals. The Minister's reason for coming forward with this idea of co-location was that the quickest way of getting more public hospital beds into the public hospital system was to de-designate what are currently private beds in the public system and turn them into public beds. The quickest way to replace those private beds, since we have a mixed system of health care delivery in this country, was to use the private sector, co-location, method to deliver private beds on public hospital sites so that the work of the consultant staff who work on the site for all patients could be integrated. The service agreements are there to ensure those facilities are available to all patients and that is the whole purpose of the plan.

Each individual hospital is coming forward with solutions in that respect to augment existing public service facilities with the co-location proposals to improve the service. The simple motivation behind this process was to free up 1,000 more beds for public patients in public hospitals and this is the reason the Government put forward this proposal. It will result in quicker delivery than the traditional public delivery method.

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