Consultants facing ‘burnout’ and ‘excessive workloads’ - IHCA

Most consultants are working well beyond their hours and are facing burnout, Gerard Crotty, president of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association has said.

Consultants will meet the Minister for Health today where they will warn him of the medical brain drain and excessive workloads faced by consultants.

Dr Crotty told RTE’s Morning Ireland that most consultants are working well beyond their hours. “Many consultants fill in for absent colleagues, many are in departments where there should be three or four consultants and there are half that number.

“Many consultants are facing burn out and have difficulty continuing. Many are seeking early retirement because of unreasonable pressures, because of excessive work loads, work conditions and absent colleagues.”

He added that the association will be briefing the Minister on the critical situation in acute hospitals and mental health services.

“We have record levels of waiting lists, month by month record numbers of people waiting on trolleys trying to get access to acute services.

“There is a severe capacity constraint in terms of beds, in terms of consultants and specialists. It is very difficult to recruit consultants, a number of changes need to be brought about quite urgently to reverse this medical brain drain which is having a very damaging long term effect on our health service.”

Dr Crotty said they will be calling on the Minister to honour the existing contract with consultants, and to reverse the ‘discriminatory changes’ which were introduced in 2011 and 2012 for new entrant consultants.

“A newly appointed consultant is permanently paid less than colleagues who started a few years earlier. That is counter-productive at a time when we can’t fill posts. We can’t get any applicants for a quarter of the posts advertised. That’s only the first hurdle. Many appointment boards interview an applicant and then find that they don’t take up posts, they may decide to stay abroad.

“We are aware of a very large number of posts where repeated efforts were made to fill posts, in vain. The current situation is costing a huge amount of money in terms of employing locums, to fill in short term for posts unfilled, these are often employed through agencies which cost more and don’t deliver the same type of service that you can get from a permanent consultant.

“There are major capacity problems and an infrastructure deficit, there have been huge cutbacks over an eight year period, over those years no planning was made for demographic increase, people requiring services, particularly older people increasing three per cent, no provision made for that.”