Doctors may charge for A&E treatment

PRIVATE patients may be forced to pay for treatment they receive from accident and emergency consultants.

The VHI and BUPA Ireland are in dispute with A&E consultants, and are refusing to pay them for work carried out in the emergency room.

Consultants are demanding payment for their services and are considering directly billing patients. It would then be up to patients to seek reimbursement from the VHI or BUPA.

Independent healthcare expert, Aongus Loughlin, warned private patients could be charged bills totalling thousands of euro. This would be in addition to their annual premium for private health insurance, which averages €530.

The Department of Health says A&E departments are not designated public or private so everyone gets the same standard of treatment depending on their priority. This means consultants working there should not be paid privately.

Standing by this ruling, both VHI and BUPA have no plans to change their policy on paying these specialist consultants.

Executive member of the Irish Association for Emergency Medicine Dr Stephen Cusack believes this system is unfair and said some members are suggesting billing patients.

“I do not see why we should be looking at ECGs and chest X-rays and why the radiologist and cardiologist get paid and we do not,” Dr Cusack said.

Dr Cusack, an A&E consultant at Cork University Hospital, said no one was suggesting patients would not be seen on the basis of need. However, he told the Irish Medical News that health insurers in other countries paid emergency doctors.

“We are consultants like every other consultant in the country and we are being discriminated against by VHI, and anything that goes for VHI goes for BUPA.”

Mr Loughlin, healthcare consultant with Mercer Human Resources, warned that private patients may be faced with substantial fees if A&E consultants start to issue bills.

“If you’re charged specifically for each item, such as each drug, dressing, suture or x-ray that they administer or review then the cost could run to hundreds if not thousands of euro,” he said.

Mr Loughlin said it would be very difficult to quantify the amount of time a consultant spent with an individual patient in the emergency room.

Spokesperson for the Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association Finbarr Fitzpatrick said there were anomalies in the current system that allowed all other consultants to be paid for their work except those working in A&E.

“We will support any action our members take to be treated equally,” he said.