Consultants under fire over private work

SOME publicly paid hospital consultants are doing twice as much lucrative private work as their contract allows, a Dáil committee has found.

But health chiefs won’t tell the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) how much private work individual consultants do or even how many hours they devote to their public duties because of secrecy clauses.

PAC chairman, Fine Gael TD Bernard Allen, said it was clear from the committee’s inquiries that the rules limiting private work to 20% of a consultant’s total caseload was not being adhered to and in some specialities the private element was as much as 40%.