Talks on a new contract between the Health Service Executive (HSE) Employers' Agency and hospital consultants resumed yesterday after an eight-day adjournment. During the adjournment, the employers' side drew up new terms and conditions which it wants attached to consultant contracts in the public health service.
Yesterday, the representative bodies for hospital consultants - the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association (IHCA) and the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) - submitted detailed responses to the new terms and conditions, which had been circulated to them on Monday.
These include a requirement that consultants be rostered for any five days in a week and work their core hours in teams over an extended day which would run from about 7am to 10pm. There is also a requirement that consultants would in future seek permission from new clinical directors before commenting in public on hospital services. But the types of contracts that will be offered have still not been set out.
Finbarr Fitzpatrick of the IHCA said last night the HSE wanted to use the new contract to "control" consultants and this was not a good thing as they had to be able to advocate on behalf of patients and speak out about the health service as they saw it.
He added that progress in the talks was "painfully slow".
Fintan Hourihan, director of industrial relations with the IMO, said discussions focused on the advocacy role of consultants, confidentiality, clinical directors, and the definition of a consultant.
"I think there is a lot of work to be done yet," he said. "One of the big things from our point of view is we still haven't got a range of contracts that we have been promised repeatedly," he added.
He added that the IMO made it clear it was prepared to discuss a longer working day, but rejected the plan to roster doctors over any five days in a given week.
Gerard Barry, chief executive of the employers' agency, said there had to be an element of control in an employer/employee relationship. "But this is not going to prevent consultants from discharging their clinical responsibilities to their patients," he said. "What we want to ensure is we have senior clinicians, namely consultants, in our hospitals seven days a week on a rostered basis which would enable us to discharge patients at weekends and speed up the throughput of patients in our hospitals," he added.
The talks continue today.