A system of evaluating the success of medical treatmentsdelivered by in the health service is needed, according to the Dail Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
Committee chairman Michael Noonan today said the focus in evaluating the health service was generally on "inputs" such as money and staff; rather than "outputs" such as quality and success of treatment.
"The health service have been measured in terms of the money being spent and the number of people employed - its all inputs that have been the traditional measurement.
"It's only now that the Health Service Executive is beginning to look at outputs ... what value for money are we getting for all that expenditure and all that staff in terms of the patients treated," Mr Noonan said.
An evaluation of questions such as how many people were treated; recovery rates; the quality of life for patients during and after treatment should be available in future, the Committee proposed.
"The real test of the health service is the outcomes," Mr Noonan said. The chief executive of the Health Services Executive (HSE) told the committee, which today issued its fourth interim report which focused on the health service, that some hospitals were 300 per cent more efficient than others.
The statistic highlighted the need to better evaluate how hospitals were performing and for the information to be made available to the public, Mr Noonan said. He was not calling for league tables for hospitals but the public was entitled to "fullest information possible", he insisted.
One of the more important decisions in a person's life was choosing where to go for treatment of life-threatening illness, Mr Noonan said.
"The public has a right to know that if they go to hospital A they have a better chance of making a full recovery than if they go to hospital B and that information is not currently available in the health system."
In the seven years since 1997, staff in the service increased from 67,000 to nearly 100,000 and spending went up from €2.4 billion to over €10 billion, the report noted.
The HSE was attempting to make savings of €200 million through efficiencies and better bargaining power achieved through the dissolution of the regional health boards. However, it must beware of making false economies, the PAC report said.
Mr Noonan noted that the capping of staff numbers was a "crude instrument of controlling costs". He said an example of this was hospitals which were circumventing the embargo by hiring agency nurses despite the cost being almost twice as high as staff nurses.
Labour TD Joan Burton, who was a member of the committee noted that while the A&E crisis has continued for many years, the numbers being treated had not increased significantly in the seven years to 2004. A question arose, therefore, about the efficiency of A&E admissions and the trolley system, she said.