Harney to shake up Medical Council

TÁNAISTE Mary Harney is seeking to alter the balance of power on the Medical Council to ensure that the majority of members on the governing board are not practicing doctors or consultants.

During a Dáil debate on the Lourdes Hospital Inquiry yesterday, she said it was essential the council was seen as “the competent authority for dealing with serious allegations of professional misconduct”.

“The purpose of the Medical Council is not only to provide a registration service for medical practitioners,” she said.

“Patients require assurances that their interests are paramount and override any sectional interest. For this reason, I believe that any self-regulating professional organisation should have a majority of non-members on its governing board and I will propose this approach for the Medical Council.”

The measure is one of a number of improvements the Tánaiste is promising in forthcoming medical practitioners legislation.

Ms Harney promised the legislation would ensure “robust governance, clarity of procedures and formal systems of accountability aimed at the protection of the patient while also recognising the need for due process in allegations against health care professionals”.

However, Fine Gael health spokesperson Dr Liam Twomey said many of the proposals the Tánaiste was now championing had been Government policy for years.

“The Government has been found wanting in terms of the recommendations of this report, many of which have been promised on many occasions but were never implemented. There will be no cultural change in the medical services unless we make it happen.

“Every recommendation discussed by the Tánaiste and those put forward by Judge Harding Clarke has been Government policy in some form for the past five years, but without implementation,” he said.

Dr Twomey renewed Fine Gael’s call for an independent patient safety authority and accused the medical profession of failing the patients the Lourdes Hospital.

He also questioned why no action has been taken against three obstetricians who concluded in 1998 that Dr Neary had no case to answer and should continue to work at the hospital.

Labour health spokesperson Liz McManus repeated her party’s call for whistleblowers’ legislation.

“If health staff working in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital over the 24 years of Dr Neary’s practice had been protected in this way the likelihood is he would have been stopped from injuring women much earlier than he was,” she said.

Given the possibility of further such scandals, she said it was remarkable “that there is no framework whereby hospitals are inspected, licensed or held to account in this country”.