Talks between health service management and doctors' representatives on the planned introduction of doctor-only medical cards and a number of other issues have broken down. Eithne Donnellan and Martin Wall report.
While some progress was reported to have been made on issues such as the 2 per cent pay rises which GPs say they were denied on three separate occasions in recent years, there are still differences between the sides on a possible parallel benchmarking payment.
Dr Martin Daly, chairman of the GP committee of the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO), said agreement could not be reached on a request by the IMO for more grant aid to general practices to allow them employ more support staff. This staff would deal with the extra workload generated by the promised 200,000 new doctor-only medical cards.
The talks between the IMO and the Health Service Executive Employers' Agency took place over two days under the auspices of the Labour Relations Commission, and ended on Wednesday night.
Gerard Barry, chief executive of the employers' agency, expressed disappointment that the talks did not conclude in agreement, but said some progress had been made.
He said there was no date for further talks, but the commission would stay in contact with both sides.
Commenting on the talks, secretary general of the Department of Health Michael Scanlan told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee: "We have to consider where we will go from here."
He added that the department now estimated €9 million had been over-paid to GPs for medical-card patients who had either died, moved away or were otherwise ineligible. However, a recent assessment had also indicated €1.8 million had been underpaid to family doctors for their care of several categories of patients.
He said a further analysis of other alleged areas of underpayment to doctors could see this amount increase significantly.