Michael Harty (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach ignored the main point I was making, namely, that understaffing in the context of consultant posts is reducing not only the quantity of but also the quality of the care being provided. There are hospital departments where consultants are burning out because of the dysfunctional service they work in and where agency locums fill gaps. The cost of employing an agency locum is twice that of employing someone in a permanent post. While the remaining consultants are holding departments together against the odds and struggling to get access to diagnostics and facilities to carry out their work, the system is chewing them up and repelling those who might wish to work in the health service.

Hospital departments are losing their accreditation because the accrediting bodies are looking at the volume of consultants in departments and the fact junior hospital doctors are not being supervised. The level of training the latter are receiving is insufficient to allow for accreditation to be given. This means that a particular hospital department will not only experience difficulty in recruiting consultants, it will also have difficulty recruiting non-consultant hospital doctors. Not only has the Government a casual approach to increasing bed capacity, a matter to which we have referred on many occasions, but there is also a recruitment paralysis when it comes to filling vacant posts. Urgent action is required. We cannot reform our health service if it does not have a proper complement of consultant staff.

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