HSE and minister urged to police consultants’ contracts

THE HSE and the Minister for Health must police new consultants’ contracts properly to ensure the taxpayer gets good value for money.

The chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Fine Gael TD Bernard Allen, said it was up to the HSE to monitor consultants’ work properly.

He was speaking following reports that than 200 consultants in hospitals across the country have been formally warned they are seeing too many private patients in public hospitals.

Under the new consultants contracts, introduced last year, limits were set on the numbers of private patients permitted to be treated by consultants working in public hospitals.

The contracts stipulate that the ratio of public to private patients treated by doctors in public hospitals should range between 70:30 and 80:20, depending on the type of contract held. If private-practice rates persist at levels above the official thresholds, consultants could face financial penalties.

Earlier this year, names of all the consultants had been requested by the Public Accounts Committee, but the HSE said it could only give the data in anonymous form due to data protection issues. Therefore, a breakdown of consultants’ work could not be obtained.

Mr Allen said the PAC was seeking legal advice over data protection rules which prevents it from finding out what exactly is going on in relation to consultants’ contracts and the public or private work they do.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) maintains the way the workload is measured is “fundamentally flawed”. Assistant secretary general Donal Duffy said the HSE figures, which show 218 consultants have been warned they are in breach of their contracts were distorted.

Mr Duffy said the work carried out by consultants in emergency departments was not logged measurement system and some consultants who had public only contracts had consultations with patients which were often counted as private work.

“We have significant difficulties with the system the HSE has put in place because it is not a true and accurate measure of what consultant activity is and, therefore, the results that are produced are also inaccurate.”