James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael)

There are some 13,000 acute hospital beds, including some 1,800 day beds, in the Irish public acute hospital system. The exact number available for use at any one time varies according to a number of factors, including planned levels of activity, refurbishment and infection control.

Beds are also closed to control expenditure because, like all other public agencies, hospitals have to operate within budget.

As I have already outlined for the House and as I will outline again, we started this year with a hospital overrun of €70 million. In the first three months of this year, under the previous Government, we had a wild overrun of activity, whether by design or through negligence. Because of the economic situation we must, effectively, take €1 billion out of the budget. We must also maintain a service that is safe for patients and implement the reform programme.

The criteria for counting bed closures and methods vary between hospitals. Instead of having a debate about the exact number of beds that are judged to be open or closed at any one time, we must concentrate on getting the best possible services for patients from the budgets available to us.

This means we need to focus on how beds are used, on the throughput of patients, on reducing length of stay to international norms and on having as many procedures as possible carried out as day cases rather than inpatient work.

The work of the special delivery unit, together with implementation of the clinical care programmes in the HSE, will help to improve the efficiency of our hospitals, allowing us to treat as many patients as possible within budget.

I believe that pursuing efficiencies through these means will be a far more productive approach than debating the number of beds open or closed at any one time.

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