James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael)
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Question 154: To ask the Minister for Health and Children her views on the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes recommendation that the National Treatment Purchase Fund be required to use private facilities here and abroad when these are available, with estimated savings of €7.5 million in a full year; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [41211/09]

Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Independent)
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The recommendation from the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Programmes was based on the findings of a 2004 Comptroller and Auditor General's report. That report found that, of a sample of cases, 44% were undertaken in public hospitals and 36% were in the public hospital on whose waiting-list the patient had been. However, this does not represent the current position. There is a ceiling of 10% of NTPF activity which may be undertaken in the public sector and this is intended for areas, such as paediatric surgery, which cannot be done in private hospitals.

The NTPF does not normally send patients for treatment outside Ireland. This was done some years ago, when there was insufficient capacity in some specialties in the private system in Ireland. That capacity now exists here. The Fund does arrange, where convenient, for patients living in border counties to be treated in private facilities in Northern Ireland. There have been 1,024 such cases to date in 2009.