Hospital consultants must do more to highlight inadequacies of the health system and stop acquiescing in the State's rationing of healthcare funding, the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association (IHCA) president, Dr Colm Quigley, has said.
Addressing the annual meeting in Portmarnock, Co Dublin, Dr Quigley said: "We need to single-mindedly return to where our instincts are, to be the patients' advocate, not the defenders of the State system which starves us of proper resources."
Dr Quigley added that patients must be made aware "before they give their consent to continuing treatment" if it was not possible to look after them adequately due to lack of resources.
Quoting Article 25 of "Principles of Medical Ethics in Europe", which states: "It is the duty of a doctor, whether acting alone or in conjunction with professional organizations, to draw the attention of society to any deficiencies in the quality of healthcare," he told consultants they had a duty not to become part of political spin-doctoring.
"We must actively agitate for the resources required for real doctoring and to expose duplicity in the political system," he said.
Asked later if the campaign could lead to hospital consultants closing waiting lists where resources were stretched and quality of care compromised, the IHCA president said such action was a possibility.
However, he reiterated the association's "no strike" clause and said industrial action would not be part of the campaign for a better health service. "Quality must come before quantity and at present we cannot deliver the quality we want to," he told The Irish Times.
Dr Quigley also called for the abolition of the health boards as soon as a National Hospitals Agency has been set up to run the State's acute hospitals but warned the new agency must not become another bureaucratic interface between the ill patient and his consultant.
The meeting heard that there are not enough consultants to deliver an adequate service in the public sector.
"With 965 hospital consultants in 1975 and the present 1,394 consultants, we have had an increase of only 429 in 27 years. We have 1,394 consultants for 870,000 inpatient and day care patients and two million outpatient visits per annum," Dr Quigley said.
He stressed that health services have never caught up with the cutbacks of the late 1980s.
IHCA Secretary General Mr Finbar Fitzpatrick said the reductions in staff and funding which have take place in recent months caused concern among consultants.
"Our major worry is that the budgetary position for 2003 will be much more restrictive," he said.
The meeting passed a motion calling on the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, to ensure that the limited progress which had been made in our hospital services in recent years is not lost in 2003 and that equitable share of resources and funding be designated for the psychiatric services.
Proposing a motion calling for a reform of industrial relations in the hospital services, Dr Tom O'Callaghan, consultant physician at Louth County Hospital, said: "Industrial relations are practically non existent in the health service. The further deterioration in services by industrial action and poor industrial relations must be stopped."