Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I have been told by people working within the health service that there are senior healthcare professionals at the moment, including some consultants, who are creating their own private companies and diverting patients from public waiting lists to their newly created private companies. It has been alleged in one case that a consultant, who created a private firm to read scans, used the hospital public waiting lists to funnel work through rostering into his own private company. It is an incredible situation and a major conflict of interest for anybody in a public role to be doing this in relation to their own businesses. The Minister must admit that we cannot allow anybody on the public payroll to be in a position where they are creating a private company and funnelling public work to their own private company.

I put a parliamentary question to the Minister for Health a couple of weeks ago to see if this practice is widespread within the sector and the response I got is quite shocking. An internal audit report carried out by the office of the chief internal auditor was written less than a year ago and its job was to ascertain if private companies were used to provide additional services such as this. It found that there was a major breakdown in terms of compliance and value for money.

For example, UHL was found not to have conducted an open procurement process with €14.2 million paid to these types of providers just in one year, 2023. Management confirmed that there were no dedicated procurement functions within the group for this. In UHL two private providers were owned or part-owned by two separate UHL employees. A third company was owned by a HSE employee with another hospital. This corroborates the allegations of this practice happening that have been made to me.

That report states that the Government was getting a handle on it, but we are actually hearing of this happening in real time at the moment. Hospitals have work coming at them at a fierce rate at the moment. I know of one hospital with a backlog of 960 biopsies at the moment. Within that backlog, there are people with cancers. There are delayed diagnoses, delayed treatments and more negative outcomes as results of this. It is clear that we do not have enough beds within the system. It is clear that investment is not getting to the front line and is getting caught up in administration. The population of the State grew by 100,000 people last year. The Government's pay and numbers policy is an effective recruitment embargo on the health service.

The INMO is having its conference today. Will the Minister send a message to that conference today to say to nurses and doctors that the Government has their backs? Will he send a message to say that the Government will end the practice of public staff creating private companies and funnelling patients from public lists into their own private companies in future?

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