Force hospital consultants to do their jobs

AN internal HSE report has laid bare the facts of a long-running national scandal – hospital consultants are not being policed and if they do not put in the hours they are paid for in the public service, they quite simply get away with it.

Last year, an RTÉ Investigates documentary revealed that one consultant who was paid for 37 hours a week was actually working for just 13 hours. Most such consultants also see private patients, and they are handsomely rewarded. A Revenue crackdown in 2016 led to 235 consultants between them paying €48.7m in unpaid taxes, interest and penalties; that’s an average of more than €200,000 each.

One reason for this is that there are not enough of them, especially outside Dublin, where advertised posts frequently attract just one application, and often none at all.

That leads to another problem. Those who are working can make a fortune from taking on a bigger workload. One colonoscopy consultant, whose basic salary was €155,000, earned a total of €736,000 in a single year in on-call payments and for emergency work.

At least he actually did the work. It is those consultants who do not who cause many of the problems in the health service, and yet the Taoiseach – himself a doctor – seems blasé about the issue.

It is clear that there is a serious crisis here. We have too few consultants. Too many concentrate solely on private patients. Those who also work in the public service frequently do not put in the hours they’re paid for because they are not adequately monitored.

We must tackle this head on with more hiring. But much of the backlog in hospital appointments could be eased if existing consultants actually did their jobs.