The outgoing chief executive of Tallaght Hospital, Dr David McCutcheon, is expected to accept a job as chief executive of a hospital in Canada. Dr McCutcheon, who resigned last Tuesday night, was head-hunted for the £200,000-plus job at a Toronto hospital.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that the hospital is having difficulty raising a bank loan of £8.5 million.
Last night when contacted by The Irish Times, Dr McCutcheon said he had no comment to make on the reasons for his resignation, or future plans. However, the board of the Sunnybrooke Hospital in Toronto is expected to announce his appointment within the next week.
There are more than 5,000 employees in the hospital, which merged with two other hospitals in June. It has a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. The board of Tallaght hospital has not yet secured a bank loan of £8.5 million. It agreed to seek the long-term loan, to pay its revenue deficit for 1998, before Christmas. The agreement was negotiated with the Minister for Health, Mr Cowen, following controversy surrounding the Deloitte & Touche report into management practices.
However, The Irish Times has learned the board has experienced considerable difficulty in securing the loan. It is not known what the board is offering as security, although Department of Health sources have confirmed it is up to the board to underwrite the loan, and not the Department.
The chairman of the Tallaght board, Mrs Rosemary French, said yesterday she did not wish make any comment on the situation at the hospital. "We said all we are going to say in the statement that we released on Tuesday night," she said.
Dr McCutcheon will continue in his post until April 2nd. After he presented his letter of his resignation, the board appointed Ms Catherine McDaid as acting deputy chief executive. Ms McDaid is the former manager of the National Children's Hospital, Harcourt Street. In 1996 Dr McCutcheon returned from Canada, where he had worked for a number of years, to take up the position in Tallaght. According to sources he has been head-hunted on a number of occasions by Canadian hospitals.
The chairman of the Tallaght medical board, Dr David Fitzpatrick, said he was "very sad" Dr McCutcheon had resigned. "It is not disastrous but it is most unfortunate from the hospital's point of view." Dr Fitzpatrick said he believed Dr McCutcheon's style of management "may have been too advanced for the Department to appreciate fully".
"If he had a fault it was that he was naive to believe what he was told, without having it written down."
Criticising the budget allocation for Tallaght Hospital, he said the Department of Health had taken the budget of the three base hospitals, "added a bit, and said `that's your budget'. If they had considered seriously the service plan given to them last year they would have seen a more realistic budget was needed, rather than just taking a stab in the dark".
He said it was not appreciated that the three hospitals had been brought together successfully. "The staff for the most part are working together in a considerable degree of harmony, even though it was three hospitals with separate cultures. The Department failed to appreciate just what was going on here and what he was trying to do. He felt let down by them."
The Irish Hospital Consultants' Association said it regretted the "untimely" resignation of Dr McCutcheon. It expressed concern about the future of the hospital and the adequacy of the services it could provide to patients, given the "inadequacy of the budget".