Taoiseach Enda Kenny has insisted that hospitals must stay in control of their budgets after it emerged the HSE deficit for the year to date has reached €195 million, with hospital deficits at more than €120 million.
Mr Kenny said the situation could not be allowed to continue where year after year, hospitals had budgets allocated and agreed to deliver services based on those budgets only to find halfway through the year they were “completely out of control”.
Speaking in Galway, the Taoiseach said such cases were a result of "incompetence", "mismanagement", or expenditure on agencies.
"The Minister for Health has made it clear that there is no more money to be allocated because there is none available," he said.
The collective deficit facing the State’s hospitals has grown by more than €20 million in one month.
The highest deficit is at the Mid Western Regional Hospital at Dooradoyle in Limerick, which exceeded its budget for the first five months of the year by €14.4 million, or 26 per cent.
Other hospitals that have exceeded their allocation are University College Hospital Galway, with a deficit of €8.7 million; Tallaght hospital, which has exceeded its budget by €7.6 million; and St Vincent’s University Hospital, whose budget excess stands at €6.3 million.
“It is clear after five months of data that some hospitals will run into serious cashflow problems if they do not take significant measures to bring expenditure down in the second half of the year,” the report notes. “Hospital deficits are being exacerbated by shortfalls in income billing against target and in some hospitals activity levels are up considerably compared with last year.”
HSE director of Finance Liam Woods said the key challenge for the authority was to keep as many services as possible running for the rest of the year with the money available.
“I think what it will mean for a period of time in some hospitals there will be some reduction in service levels," Mr Woods said.
This would include some summer closure. But he said some of those were normal and were factored in to the taking of annual leave for both clinical and nursing staff.
He said it was not possible to answer what uniform impact the situation would have, because the experience was different at each hospital.
In the case of the Limerick hospital, which has the most significant cost overrun, Mr Woods said it had some income outstanding which, if collected, would help alleviate the problem.
"I think in terms of a patient level there are definitely going to be some closures during the summer. Beyond that, on a site basis, I can’t comment," he said.