Sir, – The proposed new GP contract, which runs to 40 pages, is a thoroughly unpleasant document. Although I have had a contract with the HSE for over 20 years, as a GP , “an independent contractor ”, the HSE has not as yet deigned to send me a copy of it.
It has furnished copies to representative groups, even though it maintains that it would be anti-competitive for these bodies to represent and negotiate for me.
I have been posted copies of it by colleagues, and am struck by its venomous tone. Throughout, they do not refer once to doctors, but to “service providers”. The litany of directives is of biblical proportions, including the classic “Thou shalt not take the name of the HSE in vain ”.
The demands include preventive medicine strategies that have not even been attempted by the existing dedicated and fully staffed Department of Public Health (probably because they have not been shown to be of any use), the running of diabetic clinics without any of the staff that would be provided in a hospital, the obligation to be a member of primary care teams that do not exist, and in buildings that have not been built.
I did not spend 10 years training to be a service provider. I do not intend to spend my senior years in medicine weighing and measuring wriggling toddlers.
General practice has been functioning at a very high standard in recent decades. And people, our patients, are overall very pleased with it.
But the thrust of this document is such that I fear the HSE will not be satisfied until it has torn it all apart. – Yours, etc,
Dr VALERIE COLLINS,
Market Street,
Killorglin,
Co Kerry.