Family doctors attending the annual meeting of the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) have unanimously supported a motion expressing concern about elements of the new Medical Practitioners Act, which has radically changed the way doctors are regulated.
Proposing the motion, Dr Annraoí Finnegan, a GP in Ballinasloe, Co Galway, and director of continuing medical education at the College said that while he broadly welcomed the new Act, he was concerned that aspects of the legislation may not be in the best interests of patients or doctors.
"While people will think it is appropriate to have more control over doctors in this era of mistrust of all professionals, conducting fitness to practice hearings in public may not be good for certain patients because of a lack of confidentiality concerning the patients' personal information."
Dr Finnegan said one of the unintended consequences of having just one general practitioner on the new Medical Council would be an increase in legal challenges by doctors found to be incompetent, due to a perceived lack of expertise on a regulatory body with a majority of lay members.
On the issue of the compulsory recertification of doctors every five years, he said international experience had shown that relicensing did not guarantee the ongoing competence of physicians.
Both Dr Finnegan and the outgoing chairman of the ICGP, Dr Eamonn Shanahan, expressed concern that the HSE would not give priority to the education and training of doctors.
"I have a serious concern that when health service funding is tight, training will suffer," Dr Shanahan told the meeting.
Earlier he said there was a significant lack of trust between individual GPs and the HSE. Many GPs felt they were bypassed when it came to planning changes in primary care, he said.
"There is an impression that decisions are being made at a remove, with a variety of plans being rolled out which we are hearing about after the fact."
Meanwhile, in a keynote lecture, Dr Brian Coffey, a Cork GP and former chairman of the ICGP, said that doctors had created unrealistic expectations among patients. "We have created a rod for our own back by keeping patients ignorant of the uncertainties inherent in medicine and thus feeding societies unrealistic expectations."
However he said that if doctors gave medical advice honestly and to the best of their ability, "we will regain some of the trust that we have enjoyed before".