There are over 300 private clinics operating on the grounds of public hospitals across the country, according to figures supplied to Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín TD in response to a Parliamentary Question.
Speaking today Deputy Tóibín said: “Aontú was the first party to raise the issue of outsourcing in the Dáil. Two months ago, I told that the Dáil about how consultants were creating private firms to read scans and were using public waiting lists to funnel work through rostering to their own private companies. There are over 300 private clinics operating in public hospitals at the moment. This needs to be examined properly”.
Deputy Tóibín continued: “The National Treatment Purchase Fund have serious questions to answer – on one hand we are seeing private patients being treated in private clinics operating in public hospitals with the use of public equipment. On the other hand, we have a situation where 300,000 public patients have been treated in private hospitals since 2017 at a cost to the taxpayer, according to further data supplied to Aontú. The annual cost of this treatment is now €100 Million”.
“What we have here is either a massive inability to deliver services through the public system, or else the slow privatisation of our health service. The HSE have proven that they cannot be trusted with managing tax-payer money. The decisions they are making do not add up, economically. In recent years they introduced a recruitment freeze on nurses as a means of saving money. They stopped employing nurses at a time when we had close to a million people on hospital waiting lists. This freeze forced hospitals to avail of recruitment agencies / agency nurses to staff their wards – this cost more per hour of work than it would have to just employ nurses directly. The public health service is being funded and paid to do a job – but more and more they are found to be using public money to pay the private sector to do the job for them. It would make more sense for the government to actually invest in and increase capacity in public hospitals rather than paying private entities to accommodate public patients”, concluded Tóibín.
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For Written Answer on : 13/05/2025
Question Number(s): 1165 Question Reference(s): 24250/25
Department: Health
Asked by: Peadar Tóibín T.D.
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QUESTION
To ask the Minister for Health the number of persons who received treatment in a private hospital in the State at a cost to the taxpayer in each of the past ten years and to date in 2025.
REPLY
In relation to the particular query raised, both the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) commission a range of treatments for public patients through outsourcing arrangements in private healthcare facilities.
The NTPF has provided my Department with the information below, outlining the number of patients who were treated in private hospitals both within the State and in Northern Ireland through NTPF commissioning in each year from 2017 to 2024. In 2015 & 2016 the procurement of treatments was carried out by the HSE and the role of the NTPF was the administration of the payments to the hospitals.
NTPF Commissioning of treatment in Private Hospitals
Year No. of Patients Treated
2017 4700
2018 18,445
2019 18,157
2020 14,321
2021 42,841
2022 53,720
2023 66,447
2024 80,558
In relation to the number of patients treated under HSE procurement arrangements with private hospitals in the last ten years, I have asked the HSE to respond to the Deputy directly, as soon as possible.
