PJ Murphy (Fine Gael)

I wish to raise a topic that has been mentioned in the national media in recent days, which is the issuing of online sick notes in the State through websites that require no consultation whatsoever with a registered medical practitioner. A number of websites are offering a service where people can go online, submit their personal details, submit the details of their employer, select the dates they want the medical certificate to apply to, select from a drop-down menu what sickness they want to appear on the medical certificate, make a payment of €25 to €35, and, within a number of hours, have a sick certificate forwarded to their email address without any consultation or conversation whatsoever with a medical practitioner. I wholeheartedly agree that if an employee is genuinely sick, it should be a very simple matter for him or her to get a sick certificate. However, obtaining that sick certificate must require some form of consultation, be it over the phone, in-person, through Zoom or otherwise, with a medical practitioner, not merely by selecting a sickness from a drop-down menu on a website.

Employers are obliged under current legislation to accept these digitally generated sick certificates from their employees to pay up to five days of sick leave annually. However, once those five days have been paid by the employer, the sick payments then become the responsibility of the Department of Social Protection, which applies a completely different set of criteria to what it requires on the sick certificate. It will not accept sick certificates that are digitally or automatically generated from a website without a visit to a medical practitioner or, at the very least, a phone call consultation with a medical practitioner.

I call on the Medical Council to review the criteria when it comes to the issuing of sick certificates. I also call for an equal playing field when it comes to the criteria for sick certificates that employers must accept and the sick certificates that will be accepted by the Department of Social Protection.

On a separate but connected topic, a number of similar websites and, in some cases, the same websites are offering and providing prescriptions for antibiotics to be emailed to a pharmacist of choice, after the provision of exactly the same type of information and, again, without any consultation with a medical practitioner. In this country at the moment, we are moving in the direction of overreliance on antibiotics and there is a build-up of antibiotic residue within the population. These websites require no verification of identification in many cases. Given the overuse of antibiotics in the State and this quite loose means of obtaining prescriptions, I call on the Medical Council to examine the criteria for the issuing of online prescriptions for antibiotics within the State.