The Minister indicated he believed there is a natural inclination for patients to go to the hospitals in the ERHA region. In some respects this is because the services are still not available in the south-east. The number of in-patient beds in the ERHA region occupied by patients from the South Eastern Health Board region reduced from 15% to 11%. There has been no corresponding increase in the South Eastern Health Board budget to reflect that it is doing more work in the south-east and it remains the second lowest per capita budget in the country.
Why are more than half the consultants appointed to the ERHA? There is a deficit in the services that need to be provided in the south-east. While the Minister said the number of consultants appointed to the south-east has increased there are considerable deficits in the service.
The Minister mentioned that some patients still go to Dublin. In the south-east it takes five years to get regional services such as an ENT or orthopaedic out-patient appointment. The South Eastern Health Board has the perfect structure with a regional hospital and a number of local hospitals working around it. It is not working as efficiently as we would like because of insufficient funding. It is not a question of the Hanly report and all the silly recommendations coming from that. For instance, the Hanly report did not refer to the tertiary services offered by Dublin hospitals to any great extent, considering the cost involved.
Does the Minister not believe we should start to appoint consultants in the south-east to embed these services in the south eastern region so that we have some hope of providing the services for the 400,000 patients in the region? I would like a commitment from the Minister to increase the funding to the South Eastern Health Board region. The presentation to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children last Friday made it clear that the South Eastern Health Board is very efficient in dealing with the money it receives. However, it is also aware that huge capital expenditure will be required because its buildings are becoming run down. In the Dublin region there are too many consultants and not enough beds. Outside that major region there is a deficiency of consultant numbers. That is the problem with the Hanly report. Unfortunately there seems to be a sense that the best way of complying with the European Working Time Directive is not to bother with the consultants' contracts but instead to withdraw services from hospitals, such as the hospital I support, Wexford General Hospital. There should be a way around the directive which does not require the radical closing of services proposed by Hanly.
This is not the time to go into this. I am much more interested in hearing the Minister's views on why the South Eastern Health Board, no matter what it does, still seems to receive a poor share of resources, despite all the talk of equality.