Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is not quite correct to say model 2 hospitals are being starved of funding. I may be wrong about this but I believe every hospital, be it a model 3 or model 2 hospital, saw its budget increase last year and the year before. Therefore, the Deputy's statement is probably incorrect. I would imagine that the Minister, Deputy Harris, can provide the numbers to back me up.

I have never been fully comfortable with the idea of crudely dividing hospitals into model 3 and model 2 categories because different hospitals have different roles in different places. The hospital in Roscommon may have a very different role from the hospitals in Ennis or Nenagh, although they are all model 2 hospitals. Roscommon hospital, as the Deputy knows, has never been busier. It has seen major additions to its functions and patient numbers in recent years.

Ultimately, the whole point of establishing hospital groups was to give hospital groups autonomy and give them decision-making power regarding how best to deploy resources in their regions between the community and the hospitals, and among the hospitals. As the Deputy knows, Sláintecare refers very much to ensuring autonomy and ensuring decisions are made at local and regional levels and not coming from the Minister's office or the Taoiseach's office.

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