The Health Service Executive has more than 100 ventilators bought from new suppliers during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, which are in storage and not suitable for clinical use, the Public Accounts Committee has heard.
A further 365 ventilators worth €6.6m were donated to India. The head of the HSE Bernard Gloster told the PAC today that assessing requirements for ventilators was an impossible task with no realistic predictability models in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
He told the committee that staff involved at the time had to deliberately "over order" to try and secure necessary volume of supply, knowing that cancelling later and managing the financial risk would be factors that might arise.
The committee heard that of the orders made, the HSE is seeking to recover over €22m and over €6m of ventilators were donated to India.