HSE compo payouts - 'a hole in the public purse the size of 9,380 council houses' - Tóibín

The HSE has paid out €2.5bn in compensation over the past decade.

That's according to new figures released to Deputy Peadar Tóibín, who says that huge number of payouts is due to continued underinvestment in the health service for decades.

Deputy Tóibín says that the “upcoming budget represents an opportunity for the government to invest in the health service to prevent the further escalation of this disaster”.

"In the first few months of this year the HSE imposed a recruitment ban on nurses in our hospitals, because they said they hadn't enough money, yet during the same period they paid out €170 million in compensation to people whose lives had been negatively impacted or destroyed as a result of mistakes in our health service. It doesn't take a genius to realise that there is a correlation between nurses pay and conditions, hospital capacity, and the mistake rate in our hospitals.

"We've seen scandals in the news recently in relation to the bicycle shed in Leinster House, and indeed the shocking overspend on the National Children's Hospital. With HSE compensation we're talking about the same amount of money. That's a hole in the public purse the size of 9,380 two-bedroom council houses.”

Deputy Tóibin says that in addition to the “shocking economic cost to this...there's also a terrible cost to the patients who were failed or wronged by the system”.

“The number of adverse incidents in the health service has increased significantly in the last few years. Proper investment in our health service, improvements to ambulance response times, to bed capacity, staffing levels and a reopening of the Emergency Departments which were closed would lead to a reduction in mistakes and payouts - it would save the State money in the long term, and fewer people would be dying or injured due to mistakes.”

"The upcoming budget represents an opportunity for the government to invest in the health service to prevent the further escalation of this disaster. The recruitment freeze which resulted for the budget last year is unforgiveable, and has done enormous damage to the country. I cannot comprehend how in the middle of the health crisis in our country, the boys in charge decided that an appropriate step would be to stop employing nurses. Behind many of these statistics is a sick person, or worse a grieving family. The government owe those people an apology, and a commitment to change things," concluded Deputy Tóibín.