People who make complaints to the Medical Council about doctors and who are unhappy with the way their complaint is handled may in future be able to have their complaint investigated by an independent third party, the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, said yesterday.
However, he said he did not envisage a situation where doctors would be removed entirely from deciding on whether or not their peers were guilty of malpractice. Mr Martin's comments to journalists in Dublin followed calls on RTÉ's Prime Time programme on Monday night for the policing of doctors to be taken away from their peers.
The programme claimed up to 14,000 Irish patients a year may be injured as a result of preventable mistakes in Irish hospitals and that some 6,500 of them may be victims of outright medical negligence. Outright medical negligence refers to harm done as a result of substandard care that could be proven in court. The programme also claimed 2,000 patients may be dying as a direct result of avoidable medical errors every year. Mr Martin said the programme underlined the need for a "fundamental change in the way we report adverse incidents in our hospitals". He said the new system of insuring health care workers called enterprise liability, which consultants are due to join in January, would mean the State would have for the first time ever a national adverse incident reporting system. Currently we do not have that because people report back to their own medical defence bodies, he said.
He said the present Medical Council set-up was not satisfactory. He said lay membership of the council would be increased dramatically under the new Medical Practitioners Act which he hoped to have enacted late next year.