The Health Service Executive is to cut public health service expenditure by over €500 million in 2008.

Unions have claimed that this week the HSE informed them it will have to implement cuts of €501 million to cover overruns in medical card expenditure, the health cuts announced by the Government last week, and shortfalls in HSE value-for-money targets.

Speaking after a 'high level meeting,' at which the HSE outlined its new spending plans to unions, IMPACT national secretary Kevin Callinan said it was still unclear where the knife would fall, but said cuts on this scale would inevitably further undermine existing and promised services, despite ministerial assurances. He added that unions were led to expect more cuts in 2009.

"When you add the €129 million worth of new cuts to those being implemented because of the €300 million shortfall, then add another €72 million for the value-for-money shortfall, you are facing cuts of over half a billion Euro in public health services this year. That's well above the headline figures published last week and you simply cannot do that without hurting patients and community services," he said.

Mr Callinan added that cuts were already biting, including the recent announcement of ward closures in Galway, 100 job losses in Crumlin children's hospital, and scores of unfilled vacancies for social workers, clinical psychologists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, physiotherapists and health promotion staff across the country. The union says more than 2,700 public health service jobs have disappeared since the HSE introduced recruitment restrictions last September.

He said the health cuts would mean more serious set-backs in the promised roll-out of better care for older people, the mentally ill, and people with disabilities. "These are badly needed services and these cuts are nothing less than a broken promise to very vulnerable people. What's more, we have no idea how services will be affected next year, when budget cuts are expected to be even more severe," he said.

IMPACT said the HSE should devolve staffing decisions to local hospitals and community service managers if it genuinely wanted to minimise the affect of cuts on service-users. The union also said it had received no details of plans to develop a "targeted" voluntary redundancy scheme for senior HSE staff. No discussions have taken place with unions and IMPACT has criticised the proposal. "It will not produce early savings and people will struggle to understand why large sums of money and senior management time is being diverted to a redundancy scheme that will generate relatively few resources in the short term," said Mr Callinan.

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