Healthcare management spend in Cork and Kerry 'wildly over the pay budget', minister says

The health minister has doubled down on her criticism of healthcare management in Cork and Kerry, saying the region is “wildly over the pay budget” and demanded leaders manage their funding better.

It follows a developing row between Cork University Hospital and HSE South West over funding.

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has argued that regional budgets cover hospital and community care, including sites supporting CUH and that more use be made of Mallow hospital.

“It is important that integrated care is understood by everybody in the system,” she said.

Ms Carroll MacNeill reiterated safety alerts have not increased, but said the South West has “recruited 760 people for the first seven months of this year”.

“That is, in many cases, twice what other regions have hired in the same period,” she said.

“The regions this year were given the opportunity to manage their budget, and some have been able to do that better than others. Some have been more strategic than others.”

She said it is not acceptable to “hire twice as many people” or be “wildly over the pay budget”.

“It is for every person in leadership to make sure they’re using all of the resources that the taxpayer has given them for the best interest of all of those patients,” the minister said.

Workforce intelligence report

She was speaking to media after the launch of the Irish Medical Council’s workforce intelligence report for 2025.

More than a quarter of doctors struggled to give patients the right care at least once a week or more last year. This is higher than during 2024.

Some 8.7% had difficulties at least once a day with only 30.7% saying they never have problems providing the right level of care.

Barriers included high workloads, spending too much time on administration, overcrowding, and delays to accessing screening.

Doctors also reported not being able to access equipment.

The report shows 56.6% of doctors trained in Ireland while 14% trained in the EU or UK and 29.5% trained elsewhere.

Pakistan and Sudan are the countries where non-EU doctors most commonly come from. Numbers of female doctors rose slightly to 47.6% of active doctors from 47% in 2023.

Professor Deirdre J Murphy, president of the Medical Council, warned: “Too many doctors are telling us that workload, administration, and overcrowding are getting in the way of the care they want to provide.”

She welcomed the diversity of the workforce, saying this better reflects “changing demographics of patients and communities across the country”.

Irish Hospital Consultants Association president Professor Gabrielle Colleran was not surprised by the findings around barriers.

“This is the lived experience of so many of my specialist colleagues,” she said.

“While ‘pressure on workloads’ was the single most frequently quoted barrier, the fact that ‘time spent on bureaucracy/administration’ was a close second highlights yet again the need to accelerate the rollout of electronic health records across the health system as a matter of urgency.”