Private hospitals cannot replace public hospitals in our health service because they do not treat patients with urgent problems, such as heart attacks, strokes and those in need of urgent operations, the President of the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) has said.
Dr Christine O'Malley, newly elected leader of the doctors' union, told it's annual meeting that because it is too expensive to have staff on standby for emergencies, private hospitals do not want patients who require emergency care.
Pointing out that emergencies make up three-quarters of admissions to public hospitals, she said: "the reality is, it is easy to divert money to the private hospitals but the patients can't follow.
"Private hospitals are useful and important, but they are not a substitute [for public hospitals]. Our policy makers need to understand this."
In a reference to her own job as consultant geriatrician in Nenagh hospital, Dr O'Malley said she was tired of apologising to sick patients in beds on corridors.
"I don't want, anymore, to be the person that the family shout at when the neurosurgical unit refuses my cancer patient because no bed is available.
"And I don't ever again want to be in our hospital at midnight with a critically ill patient, desperately phoning around Ireland for an intensive care unit bed."
Emphasising the productivity of hospitals in the Republic, Dr O'Malley said that despite a onethird cut in the number of in-patient beds since 1980, the number of people discharged from hospitals here has doubled in the last 25 years.
But she criticised the €150 million investment in the failed public private partnerships (PPARS) at a time when the Health Service Executive (HSE) refused funding for systems to increase the efficiency of patient care. A pathology department in a leading Dublin hospital has a 25-year-old IT system, leading to delays and anxiety for patients. Yet a request for €2 million to replace it was refused.
Since the HSE was established Dr O'Malley said decision making in the health service has gone "from slow to standstill" and was now further removed from the patient.
Earlier, a meeting of IMO consultants was told by Fintan Hourihan, the organisations director of industrial relations, that a recent circular from the HSE had directed that no junior doctor would be employed to support newly appointed hospital consultants.
"We have examples of consultants taking up posts in the recent past who cannot work because they are without non-consultant hospital doctors," he said.
Consultants reacted angrily when they were told there would no longer be consultant input into appointments following a decision by the HSE to outsource the recruitment of consultants and junior doctors to an outside agency. Describing the decision as a "disaster", Dr Cillian Twomey, the former chairman of Comhairle na nOspidéal said: "I am seriously worried that we are back to the loudest tantrum form of recruitment, whereby who ever makes the loudest noise will get new consultants."
Private hospitals currently being developed are facing serious difficulties recruiting hospital consultants and there could be a "spectacular crash" in a private hospital in the near future.
Mr Hourihan told consultants at its annual meeting that the abolition of the Category 2 consultants contract had resulted in a shortage of consultants available to work in new private hospitals.
Category 2 contracts allow consultants who have contracts with public hospitals to do private work at a different site. The HSE unilaterally abolished the Category 2 contract for all new posts last January. "The net effect of the abolition of Category 2 is to scupper the prospects for private hospitals," Mr Hourihan said.