John Gormley

Deputy Gormley: I thank the delegation for coming before the committee. They referred to the hospital at night data collection exercise and stated that it now takes diary form. Could they expand on what was said earlier? Is it as Deputy Devins indicated, namely, that people write in diaries? Who will comprise the national implementation group? It was stated earlier that the full co-operation and active participation of the IHCA is required. Is there an indication that full co-operation has not been forthcoming from consultants? As far as our guests are concerned, what is the status of the Hanly report?

Mr. Carey:   I am anxious to respond also to previous questions from Deputies O’Malley and Gormley. To deal with the question about the consultants, unfortunately they are not co-operating with us at present because of the extension of the clinical indemnity scheme to include claims against hospital consultants with effect from 1 February 2004. The position is that formally they are not engaging with national groups. This was one of the reasons the second phase of the medical task force staffing implementation could not take place, in other words, developing the networks outside the two pilot areas. There is industrial action threatened which if it goes ahead will commence on 14 March 2005. That is the position as regards the consultants.

On the issue of the recruitment of hospital consultants and the fact that hospitals are being told they cannot recruit consultants because of the uncertainty about the situation, I wish to draw the committee’s attention to a statistic. Since 1 January 2000, an additional 505 consultants have been recruited for the public health system. I will make this tabular information available to the committee. The number of consultants employed on 1 January 2000 was 1,440 and on 1 January 2005, the number was 1,945. Of those, 121 were recruited during 2004, a 40% increase over five years. I do not think the claim, made in certain quarters, that everything is frozen is correct.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 9:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Committee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.