GPs won’t face penury any time soon

Dr William Behan (Letters, July 18) plucks something like a victim’s bow, as he catalogues the dwindling percentage returns for the ‘struggling’ GP operating the medical card system.

Perhaps he could augment his survey with a precise statement of overall net income from his medical ‘business’. That would enhance our grasp on the ‘crisis’, and maybe then we all could rally to the cause.

Given the figures that are regularly published re GPs’ medical-card incomes, one only has to surmise the additional private practice income to presume that, for most established GPs at least, there is little risk of impending penury.

No harm in comfortable salaries for professionals, but in the midst of a severe recession with unemployment figures, mortgage defaults and emigration numbers at all-time highs, one might expect a modicum of balanced generosity of spirit and some selfless empathy.

Healthcare would so much better be seen as something of a vocational community service first, and a business second.

Salaries and fees should of course be commensurate with training and experience. Otherwise the enthusiastic orientations in treatment choices, prescription patterns and appointment frequency could well become ‘inadvertently’ embroiled in a profiteering schema.

Such inadvertence could easily have some very conscious pre-cursors. Medical ‘spondulikism’ is probably a global pandemic malaise and notoriously difficult to treat, what with corporate pharmaceutics and ambitious professional hierarchies pervading healthcare systems at large. It all seems perennially resistant to curative coaxing, and dependent communities are prone.

Maybe energies could be recalibrated towards community education and general preventive health measures, plus an authentic commitment to pharmaceutical reductionism. Enhanced personal responsibility for health matters could easily reduce pressure on the public purse.

Let’s educate and innoculate with equal gusto. Plump purses may pinch a little, but they certainly won’t empty.

Jim Cosgrove

Lismore

Co Waterford