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The Blackrock Clinic, the Galway Clinic and the Hermitage Clinic are to allocate part of their existing capacity to the HSE under a new agreement with the Government to assist in dealing with the Covid-19 crisis.
The three private hospitals are part of the Parma Healthcare Group owned by businessman Larry Goodman.
The new deal, which can run for 12 months, allows for the HSE to take up to 30 per cent capacity in private hospitals. The level of capacity taken over by the HSE can be extended “by mutual agreement”, the deal says.
The Department of Health and the HSE issued draft proposals for a new agreement to virtually all private hospitals in the country on Wednesday evening, with the exception of Beacon Hospital in Dublin.
The Parma Healthcare Group on Thursday said its three hospitals would be taking part in the new arrangement.
Under the proposed deal, the State would effectively take over 15-30 per cent of capacity in the hospitals, depending on the number of cases and the impact the disease was having on the public health system at a particular time.
The preference of the Department of Health and the HSE is to use capacity in private hospitals to provide time-critical care for non-Covid public patients.
It is understood there would be an overall service level agreement between the HSE and the private hospital sector, with some element of payment based on the services provided. Private hospital practice could continue in parallel with the takeover of capacity by the HSE.
A spokeswoman for Parma Healthcare Group said it “stood ready to play its part in the national response to the third wave of the pandemic, as we have since Covid-19 arrived in Ireland many months ago.
Significant proportion
“A new arrangement with the HSE has been agreed to ensure that public patients requiring time critical/urgent care will be able to access the care they need in our hospitals if the public system cannot deliver such care due to capacity issues arising from Covid-19,” it said.
“Under this new arrangement, a small but significant proportion of the capacity in our hospitals will be made available for the critical and urgent care of public patients.”
The group said the arrangement would “not impact upon continuity of care for privately insured patients who will still be able to access our facilities”.
It said it would also “not impact upon the ability of our consultants to provide care to new and/or existing patients as this new deal will be modelled on the National Treatment Purchase Fund approach to accessing services in private hospitals”.
A spokeswoman for Beacon Hospital said it did not expect to take part in the scheme as it already had in place arrangements with individual public hospitals and the National Treatment Purchase Fund to treat public patients. She said about 20 per cent of capacity at the hospital was currently devoted to supporting the public system and about 50 per cent of those in its intensive care facilities were public patients.
The proposed new agreement between the State and private hospitals would be different to the arrangement put in place last March, which saw the HSE effectively take control of nearly 20 private hospitals for three months during the first wave of the pandemic.
At the time, private sector consultants argued that they were effectively shut out of the hospitals in which they had traditionally practised.