Health minister voices concerns over budget allocation

Minister for Health, Social Services and Public Safety, Bairbre de Brún has welcomed the recent publication of the draft budget, but has warned that the proposed level of funding for the department would not reduce rising levels of pressure on health and personal social services.

The Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) received the largest single allocation of £2,486.6 million in the draft budget for 2002/3, which was announced by the Finance Minister Mark Durkan earlier this week.

However, Health Minister Bairbre de Brún has described the figure as falling short of the amount needed to ensure a fully-functional health service. She said: “Even though the Executive has accepted that health, education and roads are facing the most acute difficulties and have to be given a degree of priority, the overall increase of 8.1 per cent proposed for DHSSPS is not sufficient to meet all existing commitments, let alone make provision for the essential development of existing services.

“These additional resources will have to cover the cost of many people currently in care whose costs are currently met from the Social Security system.”

The Minister went on to explain that taking account of this adjustment, the overall increase is more accurately 7.3 per cent.

She continued: “The remaining additionality is totally consumed in meeting only some of the cost pressures such as pay and prices, the rising costs of medicines and the unprecedented demands on health and social care services.

“There is no provision for any new service developments for which I submitted bids of some £90m and - if we are to maintain existing overstretched services - some planned developments will have to be deferred.”

Finally, the Minister explained that the announcement of the Draft Budget represented the first stage in finalising the resource position for next year.

The Minister concluded: “I will now have to look very carefully at the planned deployment of resources over the next year to see if I can identify some additional flexibility. In particular, I will need to review those Programme for Government commitments in areas such as community care and mental health for which money has not yet been allocated. (AMcE)