REACTION:PLANS BY the incoming government to provide free GP care and a single-tier hospital system for all was highly laudable if it was affordable, a prominent member of the Irish Medical Organisation has said.
Dr Ronan Boland, chairman of the organisation’s GP committee, said the programme for government laid down a lot of targets which would be ambitious even when resources were not strained.
“There are big challenges there in terms of how this might be delivered,” he said. The programme promises a new contract for GPs under which “the rate of remuneration of GPs will be reduced”.
Dr Boland said GPs had already had three income cuts and this led to cuts in doctors’ and practise nurses’ hours and pay cuts for their staff. It was difficult to see how what they envisaged in the programme would happen when they wanted to further undermine the resource base of family doctors, he added. He said the Croke Park deal committed to amending the Competition Act as it was seen as a barrier to negotiating a new contract with GPs, but that this had not yet happened.
Donal Duffy of the Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association said his association would seek an early meeting with the new minister for health to discuss how universal health insurance cover would operate, as well as other issues such as the fall-off in eligible applicants for some consultant posts.
While the programme said consultants’ contracts will be renegotiated to reduce pay, Mr Duffy said the association had signed up to the Croke Park agreement which promised no pay cuts for public servants before 2014. “We would expect the new minister would uphold his side of that particular agreement,” he said. In relation to the plan for universal health insurance cover, he said the association’s concern was not how the money for services was raised but that there be sufficient money to provide the kind of service everyone wished to have.
Mr Duffy added that he was encouraged by the plan to make hospitals more autonomous. Under the plan, public hospitals will no longer be managed by the HSE but will be independent, not-for-profit trusts with managers accountable to their boards.
Age Action welcomed plans for a single-tier health service saying it would benefit many older people by providing access to medical care based on need, but questioned why the universal health insurance model did not cover care in nursing homes or community support.
Spokesman Eamon Timmins welcomed plans to regulate home help and homecare services, but expressed concern about what older people would do when home energy efficiency and renewable energy programmes end in 2013.