The Government and the HSE appear to hate doctors, the incoming president of the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) has said.
Speaking to hospital consultants at the IMO’s annual conference in Killarney on Saturday, Dr Anne Dee said they were “working in a system that is impossible” and were being “blamed for its failings”.
“You are easy targets in that regard,” Dr Dee told the national meeting of consultants held as part of the IMO conference.
“I can never understand why the Government absolutely appears to hate doctors and why the HSE appears to hate doctors. It does appear to be kind of sad.”
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Consultants at the conference were angry at comments by the Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill several weeks ago that more consultants needed to work at weekends to deal with hospital congestion.
Consultants believed that they were being scapegoated for the overcrowding and trolley crises in hospitals.
The new IMO president also said at another event at the conference that non-consultant hospital doctors were not being treated with a lot of respect.
In a subsequent statement issued on Saturday afternoon Dr Dee said her earlier comments to hospital consultants were “not directed” at the chief executive of the HSE Bernard Gloster who spoke at the conference in a question and answer sessions with doctors for an hour.
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“But I do feel strongly that there is an underlying hostility towards doctors on the part of many, many people in the HSE and the Department of Health,” she said.
“We see that in the blame game these people play where they blame doctors for all the woes of the health services and imply that everything would be perfect if it wasn’t for doctors. The reality of course is that there are systemic issues; bed shortages, lack of resources and lack of doctors which are the underlying issues. They see us as an inconvenience, a nuisance, slow to change.
“For our part we find that hurtful and disappointing and it clearly impacts on the already poor morale of doctors around the country.”
Dr Lisa Cunningham, a consultant in emergency medicine in Mayo, said she was a senior decision maker in a hospital who had “felt the absolute point of the finger from the Minister and in certain narratives as well from the Department of Health and our HSE employers that we are to blame for the trolley crisis”.
The Minister said in March that she had been “quite alarmed” by the growth in the number of patients waiting on trolleys after the St Brigid’s bank holiday weekend in February.
She said she had asked the HSE to provide a deeper analysis of hospital consultant rostering in all acute hospitals, to cover a focused analysis of future periods’ rostering of senior decision makers in the evenings, on weekends and public holidays, initially covering St Patrick’s weekend.
The Minister said subsequently that the number of patients waiting on trolleys after the St Patrick’s Day bank holiday was down by more than 60 per cent compared the figure for the Tuesday following the St Brigid’s bank holiday.
However, Dr Cunningham told the conference that she had worked the St Patrick’s weekend and it was “one of the quietest we had in quite some time”.
“It was unusual. It was a really unusual weekend. The numbers on trolleys were not reflective of my input that weekend nor of my colleagues around the country.”
Mr Gloster said there had been no intention on his part to point fingers at emergency medicine consultants or any of their colleagues.
“The first place I have to point the finger is at myself. I am the CEO of the HSE. The reality is that I am ultimately responsible for how that system functions in the lives and experiences of five and a half million people.
“I can assure you that I have no interest in pointing the finger at you or your colleagues in emergency medicine or at any other part of the system. But I do have an interest in pointing the finger at all of us together to sort it out,” Mr Gloster told Dr Cunningham.
