Consultants defended over private work

Figures suggesting that more than 200 consultants have seen too many private patients in public hospitals are “not a true and accurate measure” of their activity, the assistant general secretary of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association said today.

Donal Duffy said the HSE figures, which show 218 consultants have been warned they are in breach of their contracts for seeing too many private patients, were totally distorted. The extent of the warnings was contained in a HSE report released to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act.

Mr Duffy said the work carried out by consultants in emergency departments was not logged in the public/ private measurement system. He said the hospital inpatient inquiry system used to measure activity was "never designed to micromanage activity" in hospitals.

"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," he told RTÉ radio.

As well as not including the emergency work, Mr Duffy said some consultants who had public only contracts had consultations with patients at the request of colleagues and that these were often counted as private work. He said public only consultants were not paid these meetings.

Fine Gael TD Bernard Allen, who is chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said it was difficult to gauge value for money and ascertain what was going on in hospitals as a breakdown of consultants work could not be obtained.

"My committee really doesn't know what is going on in the hospitals because the IHCA…has been in contact with the Department of Health and HSE telling them that if full information was given to our committee they would be deemed in breach of the Data Protection Act and common contract," he said.

Mr Allen said that, as a result, anonymous information showing serious breaches of contract guidelines had been received. He said he did not blame the consultants for this as it was the responsibility of the HSE and the Department of Health to monitor.

He said a system to gauge the public/private split should have been introduced before the most recent, and torturously negotiated, consultant contract was agreed in 2008 and that he feared patients were suffering in its absence.

Mr Duffy said a submission to the Public Accounts Committee included a report which concluded it would take three years to implement an adequate system for measuring consultant activity. He said he was awaiting a response from the HSE.