Hospital consultants and their pay deal

Consultants are allowed work publicly and privately.

What you want is a Soviet style set up. What they do outside their allotted public hours is their own business.

realitykeeper wrote: »

Those consultants should have been sued by the state for breech of contract.

Ehhhhhhh.........the consultants sued the state for breach of contract and won.

Why would the state sue them for breach of contract when they've already lost the case.

I'm guessing you're not a member of Mensa

It must be the end of the 200k public pay cap policy anyway.

Stop hospital spending? If you wanted to be dramatic about it, firing or severely reducing pay for HSE non-hospital administration staff would have been a better start.

Many hospitals are not fit for purpose. You could visit Crumlin hospital's main outpatients department or its older but still functioning wards for an example of this but there are plenty. Nationwide a lot of outpatients, A&E's and wards were built for much lower capacity than they are currently dealing with. And they don't have the theatres to take on more patients or shorten the inpatient waiting lists. Hospitals do not have enough front line doctors, nurses or administration staff.

All of our hospitals are struggling with understaffing, poor, outdated facilities and the waiting lists. If spending could be diverted from the office HSE staff and poured directly into the hospitals it would be great. Not stop spending altogether and make them beg when they're already on their knees.

Graces7 wrote: »

Given the dire state of the health service,it would have been a deeply meaningful and appreciated gesture to forgo this pay increase.

I think the really noble gesture would be making new colleagues pay parity part of the deal. Recruiting new consultants is a ticking time bomb in the health services

realitykeeper wrote: »

I hear hospital consultants negotiated a pay deal which included back pay. They also seemed to take issue with being "spied" upon to make sure they were not double jobbing.

It wasn't a pay deal. The state breached their employment contract and owed them money they were contractually entitled to.
Where is the ample evidence? The private investigators the state hired to look for evidence of breach of contract found that the vast majority of consultants were working the contractual public hours
.

It's also fairly worrying to see some of the public support the state hiring private investigators against groups of private citizens.

realitykeeper wrote: »

There is already ample evidence that the hospital consultants have worked in private practice while on the taxpayers payroll and the never ending waiting lists are a testament in themselves. Even the waiting lists are the tip of the iceberg because so so many who should have been treated, died waiting for a begrudging consultant whose only interest was to get back to his private patients as quickly as possible.

If you think consultants are the cause of the waiting list then you're delusional. The HSE dictates how many operations can be performed, what types of operations can be performed and when.

realitykeeper wrote: »

Mind you, I am all in favor of private healthcare but consultants must work for one or the other. It is clear these consultants cannot be trusted and they need a boss with the power to sack them to follow them around and to shout at them for slacking off. Consultants should only be paid for what they do and not by the hour.

That's exactly what's happening now. Over the past couple of years there has been an exodus of consultants into private practice only. At the start of this year, the Mater lost 3 of it's Orthopaedic surgeons to private practice, each with their own sub-specialisation which the public has now lost and is very difficult to replace. It's why the HSE is currently experiencing its worst consultant staffing crisis. I believe at the moment we have >150 unfilled consultant posts and of those we have filled there has only been 1-2 applicants.

realitykeeper wrote: »

Finally, hospital spending (like government spending) should stop and every demand for payment scrutinized for value in order to end waste. If a hospital overspends, the claimants should only be allowed claim from the individuals responsible and their personal estate. Am I wrong?

The health service would grind to a halt. Doctors can't clock out at 5pm if work still needs to be done, and we're so poorly staffed that you end up doing the work of multiple people. If a worker can't claim for overtime after working their 100th hour of the week then they will just quit.

RDM_83 again wrote: »

Don't a lot of contracts have clauses against you taking up a second role, particularly if it can be argued that it impacts your primary one?

The contract in question required consultants to give up their private practice or significantly reduce their hours and increase their public hours, weekend work and on-call work. The consultants agreed to this in 2008 and implemented all their contractual obligations and have continued to do so despite the DoH not paying their pay increase as per their end of the contract. In fact not only did they not receive the contractual pay increase, consultant pay was then cut by 30% as part of FEMPI cuts.

Deleted User wrote: »

Are the teachers, and all the other victims of FEMPI, going to sue the state now for breach of contract?

This revised contract was not a part of FEMPI.

There's an eye doctor in Cork who specialises in kids eyesight (opthamology).
She's in her mid 60's and trying her best to retire for the past few years but the HSE use the kids as a pressure point as there is only one other as far as I'm aware in the area so she's still working away.
She's probably raking it in but what's the point of it if you can't retire when you want to and kick back and relax.
As someone said consultants salaries might seem high but most of them are worth every penny of it. They study for upto 10 years of medicine and stay uptraining throughout their careers so its damn hard work and not one that any joe soap can do.