Private health doctors decry State ‘takeover’ PATIENTS ‘PAWNS’ IN HOSPITALS’ €100M DEAL

PRIVATE hospital doctors have hit out at the ‘secretive’ €100million-a-month deal to take over their practices – and said their own cancer patients were being put at the bottom of public waiting lists.

Private patients are being used as ‘pawns’ in a political game, they claimed, as it was revealed that the Government is paying over €100million a month to have public patients seen in private hospitals during the pandemic.

The doctors said the lives of acutely ill patients were being put at risk and that private cancer patients who were just days away from vital surgery are now being placed at the back of the

queue in the public hospital setting. One doctor told of a bowel cancer patient who was two days away from surgery when they were placed at the bottom of the public waiting list.

In a letter sent to GPs, a lobby group representing 600 doctors who work in the private sector said they had initially supported the State’s Covid-19 takeover of nearly 20 hospitals, believing it to be ‘for the general good’ as the pandemic swept across Europe.

But the group said things were going ‘from bad to worse’, as their patients were suffering and many doctors were now working at a loss. The latest figures show private hospitals operating at a fraction of their capacity, just 35% full in total, with no end to the deal in sight – despite the pandemic being well past its peak and receding further every day.

Yesterday marked a significant milestone in the country’s fight against the virus, as there were no Covid-related deaths reported for the first time since March.

Figures show that in the middle of April, just 16% of private hospital beds were occupied. That has since risen to 35%. However, it means that 65% of beds in private hospitals are lying idle while patients wait for treatments.

Consultant orthopaedic surgeon Fergal McGoldrick, who compiled the figures, said: ‘The bed occupancy rates show we are not getting a fraction of our money’s worth. I have been consistently showing this data to the [Health] Minister [Simon Harris] and to the Opposition, to demonstrate that this is a crazy waste of money.’

The Department of Health paid out €112.4million to private hospitals from the beginning of April up to the first week of May.

With the deal set to be reviewed tomorrow, and predicted to be extended – potentially until August – doctors warned that preventable deaths could occur due to their work being stalled.

Cardiologist Dr John Clarke told the Irish Daily Mail he feared there is now an ideological drive towards a single-tier health system, and that ‘patients are becoming pawns in the game’ while politicians tried to form a government. In his letter to GPs, on behalf of the Independent Medical and Dental Consultants of Ireland (IMDCI) group, he said: ‘We were instructed to close our practices, let our staff go onto the Covid payment scheme and add our patients to the public waiting list.’

He said there was no clear method in place as to how doctors should transfer their patients.

‘This has led to patients who were within a few days of getting cancer surgery privately having to start their journey again on the public waiting list,’ Dr Clarke wrote. ‘Acutely ill patients are being sent to A&E when their regular consultant can no longer admit patients to the hospital where they have worked for many years and are effectively locked out.’

Dr Clarke told the GPs that their patients were being left ‘in limbo’ by the deal, which he said had been arranged without any consultation with private doctors. ‘The contract between the HSE and the private hospitals, in which the private facilities of the hospital were put at the disposal of the HSE under a commercial contract, was done quietly and secretively,’ he wrote.

He also noted that doctors had been offered a Type A contract with the HSE, which bars all private practice, and said private hospital doctors want to know why that was necessary.

Dr Clarke yesterday told the Mail a 44-year-old cancer patient, whose bowel surgery was just two days away when the hospital deal was brokered, had been sent to the end of a public waiting list.

‘We got that decision reversed, after a lot of pressure, but it was not untypical,’ he said. ‘I have 90 people waiting for angiograms, and I don’t know who is there to do them. I’m having to make judgment calls on the most urgent cases, but in medicine you can get a surprise sometimes and someone you think is fine turns out to have major problems you didn’t know about.’

He added that his Eagle Lodge Cardiology practice, with clinics in Limerick and Kilkenny, had 2,000 patients arranged on a spreadsheet, ordered from urgent to less urgent, to indefinite.

‘We feel that the hospitals should be handed back now. If there is another surge, we will deal with it. There is nothing to say that capacity cannot be found again. But don’t park up the whole system,’ he said.

The Department of Health said in a statement that Minister Harris had not met with the IMDCI group. It added: ‘It was never intended that the agreement would result in the State taking on, en bloc, the consultants’ private rooms and related costs.

‘Flexibility had been provided to the HSE to enter into arrangements with individual consultants in exceptional circumstances and insofar as existing private and public hospital facilities are not sufficient to deliver the model of care which has been developed.’

‘This is a crazy waste of money’