The cuts come as The Irish News revealed that highest paid director of a board responsible for health service transformation has seen their pay packet rise by \u00a340,000 in the space of two years.<\/a><\/p>\nHighlighting the \u00a32 million daily overspend, Mike Farrar, the permanent secretary of the Department of Health, said: \u201cNo organisation or household would exist on that basis, and so we have to take action to bring ourselves under financial control.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut also, in doing so, we believe that we can improve services because we are spending too much of our money on the wrong things, and we need to be spending that in community, in prevention, in primary care, in the voluntary sector, to help people avoid the problems of going into hospital as a consequence of that.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo this is really important that we get this message across. We are doing both things \u2013 financial sustainability and improving health outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about the impact of the measures on patients, Mr Farrar said his view is that they can happen \u201cwhilst transforming services, and that means that we can actually improve some of the experience for patients as a consequence of following the reset plan\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year we were able to begin the process of our reset, and so we looked at some, sometimes called low-hanging fruit, at those areas where we could make initial savings,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more we move into this \u2013 and we have to do this on a continued basis for a while to get ourselves back into balance \u2013 we\u2019re looking at the re-provision of services to avoid people having to be in hospital because we\u2019ve developed community alternatives.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so we believe that actually this goes with the grain. Most people do not want to spend a lot of time in hospital, they much prefer to have care close to their own homes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know we can provide that and we can do that more cheaply than having people sat in hospital beds.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo (it\u2019s) really important to understand this is about transformation, not just reducing service costs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Within the Four Nation NHS jurisdictions, Northern Ireland falls behind in terms of key health metrics such as elective waiting times, access to primary care and ambulance handover times.<\/p>\n
The Department of Health\u2019s position is that this cannot be fully attributed to Northern Ireland\u2019s current funding level or demand on the health and social care system.<\/p>\n
Executive political parties are still to agree a budget for the current financial year, with departments operating on contingency budgets.<\/p>\n
Health has drawn an increasing percentage of Stormont\u2019s overall financial package, although this rate has slowed over the last two years.<\/p>\n
Fears are that if current trends of overspend continue, health will continue to take up an ever-increasing portion of Northern Ireland\u2019s available budget.<\/p>\n
Asked if he felt the Executive is \u201cdragging its feet\u201d on agreeing a budget was impacting the department, Mr Farrar said \u201cideally\u201d they would have had a multi-year budget.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to live with the fact that we don\u2019t in the circumstances that we\u2019re in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut even on the levels of budget that were proposed, had we had a three-year budget, we would have still been in a situation where the health service was spending in excess of its budget.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we would have had to have looked at this situation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stormont\u2019s Department of Health has pledged \u00a3800 million in savings after admitting it is overspending by \u00a32 million…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1172143,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5011],"tags":[1194,34912,1144,11191,16,7913,15],"class_list":["post-1172142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-northern-ireland","tag-budget","tag-department-of-health","tag-northern-ireland","tag-stormont","tag-uk","tag-ulster","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117167242826309684","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1172142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1172143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1172142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1172142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1172142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Mike](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/7SF4BP5DVNM45AGWPLNMCJ4QO4.jpg\")
Mike Farrar the Permanent Secretary of the Department of Health. <\/p>\n![\"Highest](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/XLWLTSXC55AEBCGVL4WE4EWHRE.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Former](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1787830058_162_ZL5JXOBY2BGA3CQWO2BJF452YA.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n