The cost to the Exchequer of the hepatitis C Compensation Tribunal is likely to reach £320 million by the time all claims have been settled.
The Committee of Public Accounts heard yesterday that awards by the tribunal to sufferers of hepatitis C are likely to come to about £277 million. Legal fees and administration costs will add another £43 million to the bill.
The tribunal was established in December 1995 to compensate people who had contracted hepatitis C from Anti-D and other blood products, which had been administered to them by the Blood Transfusion Services Board (BTSB).
Some 1,792 applications for compensation have been received so far. Of these, 627 have been heard, and some 625 claimants have received awards totalling £80.5 million, making for an average award of £128,417.
A "reparation fund" provided under the Hepatitis Compensation Tribunal Act has awarded 424 of the successful claimants extra awards totalling over £11.5 million. The fund, designed to deal with aggravated damages, awards an extra 20 per cent automatically on top of the original award of the tribunal. Another 201 successful claimants are entitled to apply for awards from this fund, which is administered by the Department of Health. Some 214 pending cases will go before the tribunal before June of this year. Another 336 cases are ready to be listed for the tribunal but have not yet been allocated a date. In addition, 34 claimants have applied for settlement in parallel to the tribunal.
The tribunal has incurred over £1.4 million in administrative costs and a further £864,496 in fees charged by its members, making a total cost so far of over £2.3 million. The legal costs incurred by the tribunal so far total £8 million. The separate tribunal of inquiry established by the Minister for Health in October 1996 to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the hepatitis C infection of blood and blood products manufactured and distributed by the BTSB has cost a further £1.24 million so far. Some £888,000 of this is accounted for by legal fees, and a further £352,000 was spent on administration.
Mr Sean Ardagh TD expressed concern that the suffering of claimants is being exacerbated by the time-lag between submitting their claims and the hearing of their cases. "We don't realise the psychological effects and the stress that brings about," he said. He called on the representatives of the Department of Health present to submit a detailed report to the Public Accounts Committee on the rate at which claims were being processed and said the report should not "hold anything back".
Responding to Mr Ardagh's call, the Secretary General of the Department of Health, Mr Jerry O'Dwyer, said that certain cases are dealt with on a very urgent basis. The Department was working to improve claimants' confidence in the alternative settlement arrangements. These arrangements would speed up the processing of claims if they were availed of, he said. Asked what measures had been taken to ensure that an incident like the infection of patients with hepatitis C never occurred again, Mr O'Dwyer said that the issue of quality assurance in the blood transfusion service was receiving "almost relentless attention". The Irish Medical Board had been strengthened and was making regular inspections of BTSB facilities, with its first annual report due shortly.
He said the BTSB was undergoing major redevelopment. Its new premises, which will cost £25 million, are set to be completed "as near as possible to the end of next year". There would also be a major investment in information technology. The position of chief executive officer of the board is to be advertised this weekend.
