John Gormley (Dublin South East, Green Party)
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Question 121: To ask the Minister for Social and Family Affairs if he intends to respond to the recommendation of the Committee of Public Accounts that doctors who certify people as being unable to work and whose patients are then consistently found by medical assessors from the Department of Social and Family Affairs as being fit for work should be monitored closely. [11040/06]

Séamus Brennan (Dublin South, Fianna Fail)
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The current approach to medical certification relies on registered medical certifiers, usually general practitioners or hospital interns, who are contracted to examine claimants and provide them with a medical certificate or a diagnostic report, as appropriate, for submission to the Department of Social and Family Affairs either to initiate a new claim or to keep an existing claim in payment. They also provide more detailed medical reports for review purposes when requested by the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

Some 5,000 doctors on the panel of medical certifiers supply medical certification services to the Department of Social and Family Affairs. I am satisfied that, in general, they provide an excellent service to the Department and to our customers. The Department's medical assessors assess and, as necessary, review claims to ensure that claimants comply with the medical requirements for the relevant scheme as laid down in legislation.

I have commissioned a review of medical certification, reporting, assessment and review for the schemes related to illness, disability and caring that are administered by the Department of Social and Family Affairs. The issue raised by the Committee of Public Accounts to which the Deputy refers, namely the monitoring of certifiers' performance, is one of the many aspects of the system being examined during the course of this review, which is expected to conclude with the presentation of a final report in April. The review also covers a range of organisational and operational issues including the potential for IT-enabled changes affecting the Department and the medical certifiers. Any changes in the current arrangements with certifiers would require careful planning and detailed negotiation with medical practitioners' representative bodies.

When the review is completed, I will have the report's recommendations examined and decisions made quickly thereafter to provide for the modernisation of the Department's medical review and assessment service. This will, among other things, enable the Department of Social and Family Affairs to monitor more closely apparent discrepancies in medical certification.