Hospital Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-09
============================================================

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire

As I said to the Deputy privately and am happy to say to him on the floor of the House, we did a productivity analysis in the Department of the actual activity being carried out in each of the four big maternity hospitals to try to determine what the level of private and public activity was. It certainly showed instances of type B contract holders going way beyond the 20% that would be implied in their contract, but it is not information that I felt was of a sufficient standard to be able to publish, share and stand over with the committee. On that basis, I have been a little reticent. However, it is certainly more than enough for me to have done the following. I have written to all the hospitals, asking that the clinical directors confirm compliance with the type B contracts. It is my intention, once I know there is compliance or issues to work on, to initiate a broader audit of how that is done. I have also cross-referenced the admitting rights of public-only consultant contract holders with private hospitals. None of this is enough for me to be able to publish and stand over, but I want the Deputy to be aware that I am doing this work and am trying to do it in a way that is verifiable and robust. It will lead to a much more significant analysis of what is happening in different hospitals.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-09