Privatisation in the Irish healthcare system
Research conducted by UCD has revealed that the Irish healthcare system is shifting from public to privatised medicine
In the study, UCD academic Dr Julien Mercille uncovered that, over the past 40 years, more than 1,000 ‘private for-profit’ hospital beds have been opened (from zero in 1980 to 1,075 across 13 hospitals in 2015), while public bed numbers have decreased over the same period (from 7,028 to 5,995).
“Ireland was a relative latecomer to privatisation, whose scale was still low in the 1990s, but grew relatively rapidly thereafter,” Dr Mercille notes in the study, published in the Journal of Public Health. He also notes that comparisons with other countries are difficult because the Irish system of classification does not follow international standards.
Still, the shortage of public hospital beds is likely down to a lack of funding. Dr Mercille noted that public hospitals have had difficulty meeting the demand for care and long waiting lists have become an acute national problem.