I am sure this is the first time the Minister of State has heard two Fergals in this House in the one night.
I ask the Minister to enlighten us about the state of the health service. We have heard about hospitals that plan to close down beds because of the lack of resources in their current budgets, the Mater Hospital being one example. I visited the hospital when I heard that 115 out of 500 beds are due to be closed. We have heard the same story from other hospitals, and there is a widespread feeling that this is just the tip of an iceberg.
We are hearing denials from the Department of Health and Children that budgets have been cut. The Minister for Health and Children mentioned last week that the Mater Hospital's budget had been increased by 9% this year, and at the same time we have the bizarre situation that patients are being sent abroad for treatment they cannot get in this country – while the numbers of hospital beds is being reduced for lack of resources.
I heard last week of a number of cases involving consultants for public patients standing around with nothing to do, because the hospital beds have been closed off, yet the State is paying for some urgent cases to go to private hospitals abroad, and the same consultants are being asked to go over and be paid for working in private hospitals. This situation is very hard for an outsider to understand as it must surely be cheaper to treat people in this country rather than send them abroad. I even heard a radio advertisement recently inviting patients to apply for treatment abroad.
The present confusion about health service spending epitomises the fact that something is very wrong in the management of the considerable public resources devoted to health. The more money we have put in, the less we have seemed to get out of it, over a number of years. Somewhere, somehow, the money is swallowed up by an increasingly bloated system producing few visible results.
I am particularly concerned at the situation whereby a hospital such as the Mater considers that the only way it can cope is by closing off one fifth of its beds. Everything the hospital continues to do thus becomes more expensive, because a large part of the hospital overheads continues to apply, and a smaller number of patients is being served by a slimmed-down system.
Apart from the denial of services to people in need, closing down beds is not cost-effective. It may make sense from the point of view of individual hospitals, but from the national viewpoint it is a disaster. In recent times we have seen an increasing awareness that there is something fundamentally wrong in the health service management, with the situation getting worse. I will welcome an explanation from the Minister of State.