Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I took a close look at this when I was going over the Deputy's question yesterday. I asked the very same question, which is if the hospital has the sixth highest level of inpatients but the 12th highest budget, what is the rationale? Is it that patients are being short-changed? The simple answer is "No".

The Deputy knows well that in comparing budgets for hospitals, we must look at many different elements. For example, we must consider case mix, complexity, average length of stay and many other factors. There is no easy way to do that but we can use the proxy of model 3 versus model 4. It is not a perfect comparison but it gives a reasonable adjustment to the complexity of cases. If the Deputy is of the view that it should be a level 4 hospital, I am happy to have that conversation. Doing a proxy for case mix adjusting, we can see the hospital has the second-highest budget for that level of hospital. That goes a long way to explaining the discrepancy pointed out by the Deputy.

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