OVER 200 hospitals have been issued with written warnings from the HSE that they are not adhering to their lucrative contracts and are seeing too many private patients.

News of a formal warning for consultants comes as it emerged that consultants in hospitals in the north are paid less than half the salaries paid to consultants south of the border. According to the north's department of health, consultants in hospitals in Northern Ireland earn between €87,460 and €117,923 a year.

But consultants in the Republic, who have public/private contracts, are paid between €184,455 and €241,531.

Under the new consultants' contracts, which were negotiated in 2008, strict limits were set on the number of private patients permitted to be treated by consultants working in public hospitals. They stipulate that the ratio of public to private patients treated by doctors in public hospitals should range between 70:30 and 80:20, depending on the type of contract the consultant held. Consultants are meant to be penalised financially if they persist in breaking the ratio with more private work.

The Dáil's Public Accounts Committee recently compiled an analysis of consultants' contract compliance, which counted the number of consultants who had been written to "regarding non-compliance with their private practice contractual limits".

The highest record of non-compliance was recorded at the Mid Western Regional Hospital in Dooradoyle, Limerick, where 30 of the hospital's 66 consultants have been issued with formal warnings.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) has repeatedly questioned the way its members' public/private work ratio is measured. The IHCA claims work carried out by consultants in emergency departments is not logged on the HSE's measurement system and that some consultants have public work logged as private.