David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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537. To ask the Minister for Health the expenditure on third party insourcing by the HSE in 2023, 2024 and 2025, by hospital, in tabular form. [29388/26]

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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As this is a service matter, I have asked the Health Service Executive to respond to the Deputy directly, as soon as possible.

David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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538. To ask the Minister for Health if she will meet her end-of-June target for ending third party insourcing in the HSE; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [29389/26]

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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The Government is focused on having a public healthcare service in which everyone has timely access to high-quality scheduled care, where and when they need it.

We are committed to improving access to hospital care & reforming and reducing waiting times for patients through a range of measures, including those to increase capacity.

In 2025, in light of concerns about an overreliance in the system on supplementary capacity, I asked the HSE CEO, to undertake a detailed review of all insourcing activity within the HSE.

Following consideration of the review that focused on third party insourcing, with my officials and the HSE I authorised the CEO to introduce a number of enhanced control measures to limit the practice in the immediate term with a view to it ceasing at the end of June this year.

These control measures included:

• Certification that all core capacity (POCC and 5/7) is fully utilised, standard overtime and agency options (traditional insourcing) are exhausted, all approved offsite outsourcing is exhausted before third-party insourcing can be considered.
• The relevant provider must be on the HSE DPS Framework, be assessed for conflicts of interest, comply with employment law and all contracts be limited to 3 months.
• Use of third-party insourcing must be certified and approved by hospital CEO, subject to fortnightly retrospective review by IHA manager or REO and only used to reduce patient waiting time.