Health minister says some regions have had finance powers removed because they overspent on hiring
The Irish Health Minister has stripped several regional health services of their financial autonomy due to excessive spending on staff recruitment. The government is moving toward greater central control to manage budget deficits within the Health Service Executive.
Why it matters
This reflects a broader tension between decentralized management and fiscal discipline in public healthcare systems.
HEALTH MINISTER JENNIFER Carroll MacNeill has said some regional health services are overspending on payments to staff and that is why they have had their day-to-day spending powers stripped.
Speaking to The Journal , MacNeill said that some regions are performing better than others when it comes to managing budgets.
Public Expenditure Minister Jack Chambers told The Irish Times’ Inside Politics podcast this week that four Health Service Executive (HSE) regions were “going to lose autonomy on day-to-day spending and there’ll be much greater controls introduced on all elements of pay and non-pay spending”.
MacNeill said that she and Chambers are “very much at one on this”.
“The whole health service has experienced a fairly significant increase in demand this year, particularly in our emergency departments, but nothing like the level of demand that would match the spending increases on pay,” she said of the four regions.
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