Psychiatrists forced to do without offices and staff

Further evidence of bad planning in the public health sector has emerged in a new study which finds medical consultants are constantly…

Further evidence of bad planning in the public health sector has emerged in a new study which finds medical consultants are constantly being appointed without any support structures to allow them to do their jobs.

The study has found 66 per cent of consultant psychiatrists appointed over the last five years were still waiting either for an office, clerical support, junior doctor or community nurse three months after taking up their post.

And a year after taking up their jobs, 40 per cent of them were still without one or other of these "very basic ingredients" to allow them to do their job properly.

Dr Aisling Denihan, who conducted the study among 89 consultants, said she was nine months waiting for an office and clerical support after she was appointed as a consultant psychiatrist for older people with the former North Eastern Health Board in January 2003.

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"It was a a full nine months before I could start accepting referrals from GPs. I did what I could but it was an absolute waste of money We are expensive personnel," she said.

"It's daft. I can't tell you how demoralising it was for me spending nine months driving to Navan and able to do very little," she added.

"Despite the fact that health boards had on average five months notice of a consultant's start date, there was still a lot of disorganisation when people came to take up their posts."

When Dr Denihan was finally given a "beautiful suite of offices" by her health board in Navan it emerged that the building did not have planning permission to allow her to see any patients in it, so she has to see patients in their own homes.

"I think its all due to bad planning," she said. There were also question marks over where money allocated for new consultant services was going, Dr Denihan claimed.

Her research found there were 138 consultant psychiatrist posts approved by Comhairle na nOspidéal between 1998 and 2004 but 35 of them remained unfilled. But funding would have been approved for the posts by the Department of Health before Comhairle na nOspidéal could approve them, she said.

She said her post had been approved for some time before she filled it but when she sought the funding that went with it to get her service up and running, it was "gone". A manager told her it had gone "to the corporate good".

Dr Denihan, who will present her research at an Irish Psychiatric Association meeting in Dublin later this week, said she hoped lessons would to be learned from its findings.

"We want to point out the problem so something can be done."