Dr Mosney Asylum a fiction says board

DR MOSNEY ASYLUM, the medic who appeared to receive €4,940 for treating asylum seekers, is fictional and so was the payment made to him.

The General Medical Services (Payments) Board (GMSPB) yesterday admitted Dr Mosney’s name had appeared on the annual list of doctors paid for treating medical card holders due to an administrative cock-up. GMSPB chief officer Paddy Bourke said the name had been created to accommodate a computer programme which allocates money to doctors based on the number of medical card holders they treat. Because a number of card-holding asylum seekers in the Mosney accommodation centre are not assigned to any doctor, a name was devised to allow the computer programme to run and to set aside money for the treatment of these individuals. As a result, almost €5,000 was set aside.

“There is no Dr Mosney and no money was paid out. His name should have been deleted from the list,” Mr Bourke said yesterday. The asylum seekers for whom the money was set aside have not yet been treated under the medical card scheme.

Mr Bourke said because the GMSPB deals with 6,000 service contracts, 2,200 with GPs, he had not spotted the fictitious name on the payments list. He said there was no fear of a repeat error next year. Doctors who treat patients under the GMS scheme receive approximately €250 per patient. A statement from the North Eastern Health Board (NEHB), where the Mosney centre is based, said yesterday three GPs provide services to the estimated 800 residents.

A new report drawn up by the NEHB is highly critical of health service provision to asylum seekers in Mosney. The report said 44 cases of non-medically managed circumcision had been carried out on infants in the centre since the start of the year. It also found children of school-going age are not being offered their booster immunisation vaccinations and it found delays in immunising babies, some of whom were four months old by the time they received their five-in-one, which should be given at two months.

A spokesperson for the National Disease Surveillance Centre, while not commenting directly on Mosney, said children needed to be up to date in all vaccines. These include vaccination against diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, TB, meningitis C and polio.

Labour Party health spokesperson Liz McManus said it was “inexcusable that babies and children have not received appropriate vaccinations and are, therefore, prone to infection themselves and subsequently to infecting those they come into contact with”.

Fine Gael spokesperson Olivia Mitchell called for a specific health budget for the Mosney centre “to avoid a public health crisis”. The NEHB report identified an €8.5m deficit in meeting the needs of the asylum seekers.