GP posts ignored ‘because of costs’

HEALTH Boards have failed to fill 27 GP posts around the country because graduates cannot make a living out of the present medical card system, the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) claimed yesterday.

These posts have been vacant for some time because young graduates cannot afford to take them up, IMO GP leader Dr James Reilly said.

“One of the posts even has a large list of 1,200 GMS patients and young graduates cannot take it up because of the huge costs of setting up a practice in the centre of Dublin,” he said.

Young doctors could not afford huge mortgages and the cost of staffing a new GP practice, particularly in Dublin where many of these vacant posts existed, he added.

Now young doctors were opting to work in hospitals because the money was better and their work hours would be reduced dramatically over the next four years.

“Something will have to be done to make it economical for doctors to set up a GP practice, rather than opting to stay in the hospital service,” Dr Reilly said.

The IMO had been campaigning for the past year to get the Department of Health to increase the amount of money that doctors get for operating the General Medical Scheme.

“But we cannot get the Department of the Health Service Employers Agency (HSEA) to sit down and talk to us about this,” Dr Reilly said.

A department spokesman had not responded to the IMO claims about under funding of the GMS scheme and why they had not entered talks at the time of going to press.