John Kelly (Labour)

I support the call by my colleague, Senator Denis Landy, that a deputation visit the primary care reimbursement service, PCRS, in Finglas to see what is going on in regard to the processing of medical cards because it was big topic of debate on every local and national radio station over Christmas. Yesterday, I received a call from my local radio station, which incidentally is the same as the Cathaoirleach's, to remind me that I said on radio 12 months ago that this would not work. Judging by the number of telephone calls coming in, it is simply not working.

I will give one example of someone who had cancer. I told the person to give me the renewal form and that I would send everything to the PCRS with a covering note to ensure it would not get lost. Within three days, I received an acknowledgement from it by e-mail with the name of a person and a reference number. That was followed two weeks later by a letter to the family asking why it had not renewed its medical card. I telephoned the PCRS a few days later but it could not find anything in regard to the family. The reference number it had quoted in the e-mail did not relate to the client whose information I had sent in.

A week later somebody else telephoned me about the matter and said that the medical card would be rolled over for one month while the PCRS tried to find the details. The PCRS came back to me three weeks later to ask that the person send in all the information again. I said that under no circumstances would the person go to all that bother again. Whether the PCRS found the details after that or not, the person eventually received a medical card which was rolled over for 12 months.

There is something scandalously wrong with the way things are being done. There should be a dedicated section to deal with urgent discretionary medical cards. Bearing in mind that the Minister for Health said in this House that he was told by the PCRS that 85% of medical cards are straightforward and are dealt with in ten to 15 days - I do not believe that - I call on the Leader to ask the Minister to call for an internal audit of those figures based on the last six months of 2011.