Consultants’ concern over move into the non-essential public list

CONSULTANTS are growing increasingly concerned over their working conditions as the State makes demands for non-essential public work of the formerly private hospitals it took over at the start of April.

The Kerryman understands that Tralee’s Bon Secours Hospital has been hit with demands to start working through non-urgent public waiting lists in the past number of weeks, as with the other private hospitals that were effectively commandeered by the State.

It’s an issue that has exacerbated the concerns of consultants in the Bon Secours already worried about their own private businesses at a time of ongoing uncertainty. Under the arrangement with the State, only essential, urgent care was required of the newly public setting as part of the COVID strategy.

Nine of the formerly private consultants at the Bon Secours Hospital in Tralee indicated their intention to resign from the public contract when it concludes at the end of July in a letter to management last week.

The ‘resignations’ are seen largely as a statement of concern over the new demands, from consultants who also indicated their ongoing commitment to tackle the pandemic.

Up to 30 of the 35 consultants at the hospital signed the Type ‘A’ contracts offered by the HSE to private consultants. It provided a temporary locum contract for three months, plus one, to treat public patients on a scale ranging from €141,000 to €195,000.

Bon Secours Manager TJ O’Connor said he could not comment on the matter this week, but told The Kerryman that the hospital’s consultants had made all the difference in the hugely-successful way that University Hospital Kerry and the Bon Secours merged against COVID-19. The arrangement with the private hospitals is to expire by the end of June, but it is anticipated that the HSE will move to extend it for a month. If so, it has to notify management of the private hospitals of the extension of the arrangement by letter this week. However, it is also now anticipated that, in the light of the State’s relative success in the campaign against COVID-19, that the arrangement will not last beyond the end of July. If that is the case, the resignation notice by consultants will be moot as they return to private practice. The welfare of their private patients and the operating costs of their own practices were among their chief concerns in the face of the public contract at the outset of the new, and so far, wholly public healthcare system.