Reports from meetings of health officials contain ‘inaccuracies’, Watt says

The head of the Department of Health has said reporting of internal meetings of officials contained "some factual inaccuracies".

Robert Watt, the secretary general of the Department, wrote to an Oireachtas committee last week to criticise several aspects of the reporting and to criticise the distribution of recordings and transcripts of conversations.

Mr Watt told the committee, which is examining the matters raised by the reports, that “recordings and transcripts were made and released without [officials’] knowledge and this has led to partial statements that were taken out of context and also contained some factual inaccuracies”.

Among the issues he disputed was the report that the Health Service Executive (HSE) sought “just €10 million in additional funding for 2022 and that the Government had pushed an additional €23 million on the HSE”.

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He told the committee that the sum sought by the HSE was €35 million, following a “lot of back and forth during the estimates process”. He said the final figure agreed was €37 million, a differential of €2 million plus €10 million in “one-off funding”.

He also said that a prior year adjustment to the HSE 2020 accounts, which corrects a previous error, would be in the range of €10 million to €100 million. Previous reports had suggested officials believed it could run to the hundreds of millions.

Documents supplied to the Public Accounts Committee and reporting in the Business Post also claimed that officials discussed how targets for recruitment – of 10,000 new hires for the year – were “fake”. Reiterating comments he made at the health committee last week, Mr Watt accepted that hitting that figure would be difficult “due to the current challenging recruitment environment”.

He said the 10,000 target reflected the ambition for the health service but was seen as a “stretch” target, with a “more realistic recruitment target of 5,500” also set out.

“Actual recruitment will, as always, be monitored by the HSE and the Department throughout the course of the year under the governance and oversight arrangements in place,” Mr Watt said.