UP TO 300 health service staff processing medical card applications at local offices across the State will go on strike if the HSE goes ahead with plans to centralise the processing of all such applications in Dublin, a trade union official warned yesterday.
Impact official Gerry Dolan said the HSE planned to centralise the applications process on a phased basis from the end of this month in a bid to save €10 million. He claimed there had been no discussions with unions on the issue, only an announcement some months ago that the change would take place.
He warned the centralisation of medical card applications would make it harder and slower for eligible people to obtain medical cards. It would depersonalise the process, forcing vulnerable citizens to depend on e-mail and recorded telephone messages to have their applications dealt with, he claimed.
Applications by those aged over 70 for medical cards has already been centralised and Mr Dolan said this resulted in long delays, mistakes and poor response times leaving patients and doctors frustrated and confused. “Numerous cards have been cancelled and listed as ‘deceased’, even though the cardholders are still very much alive,” he said.
The HSE said the plan to centralise the processing of medical card applications had been outlined in its service plan for 2009.
It said there were no plans to close any of the 32 local health offices that currently process medical card applications. These offices have several other functions and will continue to offer advice on medical card issues. The HSE is aiming for a turnaround time of 15 days or less for all medical card applications under the new system.
It said staff would be redeployed within the HSE to work on the centralised applications system and discussions were ongoing with Impact and Siptu in this regard. However, Mr Dolan claimed there had been no discussions. He said the HSE had not engaged at all on the issue and if it moved to unilaterally make the changes, staff would take industrial action. They have already been balloted.
“Impact offered to participate in a genuinely inclusive examination of real improvements and better efficiencies in the current locally based system. We believe the HSE refused this offer because it has a more sinister agenda of saving money by making it harder and slower to obtain a medical card at a time when thousands more people are becoming eligible because of the recession,” he said.
Impact is this week writing to every elected public representative in the State asking them to pledge their opposition to the planned changes.
Figures provided by the HSE show the names of more than 27,000 medical card holders have been deleted from the State’s medical card database in the first six months of this year. Some 21,423 of these deletions relate to people over the age of 70 years. More than 12,000 of them voluntarily returned their medical cards after the automatic entitlement to a medical card on age grounds was abolished in the budget and the other 9,000 or so include over-70s who were deleted from the medical card lists as a result of a validation exercise carried out by the HSE. This validation exercise uncovered the names of people who had died or who had moved to a new address and were on the list twice. The names of a further 5,692 people under 70 years which had been on medical card lists have also been removed during the HSE’s cleansing exercise.