A&E crisis leaves consultants ‘sitting around drinking coffee’
The union, which has 680 consultant members, said the accident and emergency crisis means beds allocated to scheduled surgery are being taken up by general emergency patients and surgery is subsequently cancelled.
One surgeon, who said he is “well paid”, said he does not have enough patients to fill his working day.
Sean Johnston, who works at the Midlands Regional Hospital in Tullamore, said he is so eager to fill his weekly public surgery hours that he has offered to take patients from the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) database and operate on them at the Midlands Regional.
While he is awaiting a response, the Department of Health is paying for public parents to be treated privately at a midlands healthcare facility.
Mr Johnston said his lack of patients could be due to the fact he is only in the post a year but he said the A&E crisis is also a problem for him and others.
“I have spare capacity which I can’t fill. I should be doing surgery from 8.30am to 5.30pm every Monday but very often I’m not. I want to do more surgery. It’s what I’m trained for and what I like doing,” he said.
He has argued that the money spent on such NTPF cases could instead be injected into public services at Tullamore.
Under the NTPF, patients who are on public waiting lists for more than six months are treated privately in Ireland or in Britain.
“That is morally wrong, these patients should not be seen privately if they can be treated in the public system. I am paid to look after these patients.
“Hospital management are fully backing me on this but the department doesn’t seem to think it’s worthwhile,” Mr Johnston said.
The Irish Medical Organisation said many surgeons have light surgery lists because of the A&E chaos.
“These doctors are expensive to train and not cheap to employ and yet are being left idle through mismanagement. It doesn’t make sense to have them sitting around drinking coffee when they want to do their work,” said IMO president Dr James Reilly.
The IMO has called for scheduled operation beds to be ringfenced so that they can’t be used for patients who enter the hospital through A&E.
“Our health service is becoming purely an emergency service. Yet, it makes no sense from an economic perspective to be canceling operations as it is much more expensive to look
after these people when they come back through A&E with added complications,” said Dr Reilly.
A Department of Health spokesman said it was a matter for the NTPF to deal with.
