Boards advocate swipe cards to monitor doctors

Health boards want to introduce swipe cards to monitor the attendance of non-consultant doctors in hospitals.

The Health Service Employers' Agency (HSEA), which represents hospital management, confirmed this weekend that the boards want to introduce a swipe card which would record the working details of non-consultant doctors.

A spokesman for the HSEA told The Irish Times last night that discussions on the introduction of the card were at a preliminary stage.

The HSEA has yet to raise the matter with the doctors' representative body, the Irish Medical Organisation.

In a report to the Department of Health, the national co-ordinator for the implementation of the new European Directive limiting doctors' working, Mr John Bulfin, said it was regrettable that an automatic swipe card was not being introduced as part of a new payroll system for the health service.

He said that the electronic swipe card "would have been an essential element to enable the monitoring /capturing of attendances by NCHDs, especially those who are on-call, off-site and are required to attend for duty.

"As the introduction of this swipe-card attendance monitoring would also inevitably have IR implications, its introduction now could have been linked to the modernisation agenda under Sustaining Progress," Mr Bulfin wrote to the Department of Health.

It is understood that the Health Board Executive is looking at the feasibility of such monitoring systems.

The IMO's director of industrial relations, Mr Fintan Hourihane, said there were likely to be mixed views among doctors on the introduction of such electronic monitoring.

He said some doctors had proposed such a system several years ago when hospitals were arbitrarily refusing to pay for overtime worked in excess of 65 hours per week. However, others believed such "clocking in and clocking out" went against the professional ethos of medicine.

Some years ago motions on this issue had been put forward at the IMO's annual conference, but no decisions had been taken.