Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I did not read the article, but I know what I said. What I said was that, if the average GP referred two fewer people to specialists each week, that would be 5,000 fewer referrals a week and 20,000 fewer referrals a month and, without any additional capacity at all in our hospitals, we would see waiting lists fall. How could that be done? In two ways. First, provide GPs with better access to investigations so that they do not need to send somebody to a specialist who then sends him or her for a scan, scope or whatever. They could have direct access to investigations. We are starting to make that happen, but it is happening far too slowly. The other aspect, of course, is to allow and fund more GPs to perform more procedures themselves, for example, minor surgeries. When I was the Minister for Health, I started that - allowing GPs to do minor operations and be paid for them rather than referring patients to specialists.

The second way is accountability. We do not actually monitor referral rates by GPs, so we do not know who are the ones who refer too many patients and we do not know who are the ones who are appropriate and efficient in their referrals. Other countries do, and they can identify GPs who are over-referring and take action to encourage them to be more appropriate in their referrals. They can identify the GPs who refer appropriately and do not refer very often. They actually get fast-track access to specialists. That is what is done in other countries and we should do it here.

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