THE first specialities to benefit from consultants appointed under a new work contract will be those with long patient waiting lists, Health Minister Mary Harney said yesterday.

DOCTORS at a Tipperary hospital depend on a weekday-only taxi service to transport MRSA swabs for analysis to Limerick.

EIGHT patients of one Dublin hospital sent to Britain for treatment under the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) returned in worse health.

A €20 million inquiry into the retention by hospitals of organs of dead children may never look beyond the three hospitals it took five years to investigate.