The Tallaght Hospital management is confident the report of the independent consultants sent in by the Government will support its case for additional funding.
Last week Deloitte and Touche was asked by the Minister for Health, Mr Cowen, to review a number of issues, including arrangements for service planning in the hospital and budgetary matters. The first meeting between the consultants and hospital management took place last Friday.
According to a Department spokesman, this is the first time an independent consultancy was asked to go into a hospital in this manner. It followed a submission from its management board which confirmed the degree of the budgetary difficulties, received on September 25th last. The Minister was briefed on September 28th, and decided to send the consultants.
However, according to a hospital spokeswoman, it had already been agreed there would be an interim review of the way the hospital was working when it had settled in. It had now been open for three months, and such a review was due. She said the hospital was "slightly over budget" but not to the scale reported in some media.
Tallaght hospital received its initial allocation of £53.659 million, based on the budgets of the three base hospitals which were merged into the new hospital - the Adelaide, the Meath and the National Children's Hospital - plus a sum to fund the move to Tallaght.
However, sources close to the management claim this allocation does not take account of what is demanded of the hospital - that it provide a modern, high-tech service to its catchment area, spreading from south-west Dublin to north Kildare. This involved introducing services not available in the base hospitals, and increasing the staff-patient ratio.
"The Department has been advised all along what this meant," said one source. "There's only an overrun because the Department initially set the allocation too low. We don't think they have given full-blooded support to providing service to the people of Tallaght."
The source said the figure to look at was not what was originally allocated, but the budget for other acute hospitals in Dublin, such as St James's and Beaumont, which have budgets of about £67 million.
"We can't operate from what the three base hospitals historically were. Our catchment area is slightly bigger than Beaumont's," he said. "Now we're ready to develop the services. No matter who's managing the hospital they [the Department] will have to face up to that, and the consultants will have to take into account what it costs to run comparable hospitals."