asked the Minister for Health if his intended proposals to voluntary hospitals to curtail seriously certain aspects of hospital administration arising from the expected disappearance of assistance from the Hospitals Trust funds to meet deficiencies, will not seriously militate against the expressed policy, announced by him, to increase hospitalisation and to make hospitalisation more readily available to the general public; and, further, if he will state when depreciation of the capital assets of the Hospitals Trust funds first began, and when he expects his hospital building programme will have entirely exhausted existing assets of the fund, and what steps he proposes to take to ensure that there will be no crisis arising in the administration of each voluntary hospital hitherto benefiting from these funds.
Ceisteanna—Questions. Oral Answers. - Hospitals Trust Fund.
asked the Minister for Health whether he will not reconsider the expenditure to exhaustion of Hospitals Trust Fund on capital items, and revert to the previous policy of holding substantial funds for investment to meet deficiencies in existing hospitals, which otherwise will cause extra indirect charges on the public.
I propose, a Chinn Chomhairle, with your permission, to take Questions Nos. 53 and 52 together.
There is no foundation whatever for the Deputy's statement that I propose to curtail, seriously or otherwise, certain aspects of hospital administration. Neither is there any truth in his further statement that assistance from the Hospitals Trust Fund to meet hospital deficits is to disappear. The recent decision to fix at the high figure of £400,000 the amount which will be payable to the participating hospitals by way of recoupment of deficits in respect of each of the years 1950, 1951 and 1952 is sufficient refutation of these statements.
The initiation and energetic execution to date of the seven-year hospital building programme should be sufficient earnest of the announced policy to make hospitalisation readily' available to the general public.
Depreciation of the capital assets of the Hospitals Trust funds began when the purchasing power, in terms of goods and services, of these assets commenced to decline. If the cost-of-living index figure may be taken as a criterion, that process commenced in 1933. The rate of decline accelerated considerably since the commencement of the recent war. Falls in the market value, in terms of money, of the investments contributed further to the decline.
Owing to the many factors, in regard to time and cost, incapable of correct measurement beforehand involved in the planning and execution of a very extensive programme of construction and the fact that income continues to accrue to the fund from sweepstakes, it is not possible to give any estimate of the precise time at which what is generally regarded as the capital of the fund will have become exhausted; but I regard as a sounder national policy the provision of much-needed hospital accommodation than the building up of an investment reserve, a policy which the experience of the past ten years has shown to be a thoroughly bad one. Had the policy which I am now pressing been pursued energetically in previous years, many of the hospitals which are only now in process of construction or planning would have been available long since to the public, and at a fraction of the cost which is involved in their provision now. In these circumstances I do not propose to change the present policy.
The most important of the immediate steps being taken to avert any crisis of the type visualised in the question in the affairs of the participating hospitals have already been notified to those hospitals. These include: (1) The decision already mentioned to stabilise the deficits in respect of the years 1950, 1951 and 1952, and (2) the decision that public assistance authorities might pay to the voluntary hospitals in respect of patients sent by them to such hospitals a figure for maintenance more closely approximating to the actual cost of maintenance than the present payment, a matter with which I shall deal in more detail in reply to later questions on the Order Paper. I regard these steps as adequate for the present.
I propose to provide the Deputy with full information in regard to the stabilisation of the amount of the deficit in introducing the Estimate for my Department in the immediate future.