Saolta hospitals’ €100k PR bill slammed as ‘outrageous’

The cost of hiring a private consultancy to provide PR and communications advice to public hospitals in the West, including three in Galway, has been slammed as “outrageous”.

Saolta University Healthcare Group, has confirmed that between January and November of this year, it paid €100,737 to Setanta Communications, a Dublin-based firm.

The company is contracted to provide 104 company days per annum, of ‘communications support’ to the Saolta Group of hospitals.

Saolta has two in-house employees who provide communications to the group, and its six hospitals including UHG, Merlin Park and Portiuncula. Each HSE regional area also has communications staff.

The latest HSE West Regional Health Forum meeting heard how Setanta Communications, who won a competitive tendering process, provides “support services, including provision of out of hours and weekend cover to the Saolta Group and all of its constituent hospitals”.

This support “is necessary to manage the internal and external communications requirements, for a group of six hospitals across seven sites, employing 9,000 staff and serving a catchment in excess of 700,000 people,” said Ann Cosgrove, Chief Operating Officer at Saolta.

She pointed out that communications support from HSE at a national level ceased as of August 2014.

Setanta Communications has been contracted to provide a service again in 2017.

She said a lot of media queries are dealt with internally during the week but Setanta supplies responses during out-of-hours and weekends.

City Councillor Pádraig Conneely (FG) said to pay €100,000 for the first eleven months of this year was “outrageous and scandalous”, at a time when there are cutbacks in the health service.

He said there are “any amount of well paid” communications staff within the public health system, who could do the job Setanta was doing.

He criticised Setanta for the dealings he has had with the company. “If you ask them anything all you get is a one-liner. €100,000 for one-liners – that’s not bad,” he said.

Ms Cosgrove said the 104 days Setanta is contracted to Saolta are not “date specific”. “Not date specific? They won’t be working Galway Race Week, will they?” asked Cllr Conneely.

HSE area manager Bernard Gloster said the number of in-house communications staff hired by the hospital group was “quite lean”.

Mr Gloster said they fulfil a range of functions, including updating social media and websites.

“They are not just sitting there waiting for a media query to come through to respond to,” said Mr Gloster.