Mr. Anthony Owens:

Currently there is no mechanism by which consultants would clock in or clock out. One must bear in mind that consultants would work, in a large part, across several sites and there would need to be some joined-up thinking there. There are also instances where a consultant would arrive to provide some kind of emergency treatment so how would that be captured? There is no mechanism for this and as of yet we have not received proposals to engage with on that issue. The Taoiseach took to Twitter to suggest something might happen but there is nothing we are aware of that is leading to that yet.

The Deputy mentioned non-consultant hospital doctors and with their clocking in process we found it was a very good means of capturing the hours worked, both in terms of European working time directive compliance and ensuring they were paid for the hours worked. If consultants were asked to be on some kind of timing system, it would capture the hours worked. We believe consultants work well in excess of what their contracts set out. We recently surveyed our members and found that up to 60% were working up to 20 hours over the contractual commitments. It was almost a perfect bell curve, with the contractual commitment on one end of the axis. If the time would be captured, we would have to consider what to do with the details. I am sure there would be a feeling among the consultant body that capturing the time should lead to some kind of remuneration for the time. I know contracts allow a payment for structured on-site attendance at weekends and so on but they are not always honoured. If we were to capture them, we would have to look at something like that.