The Minister for Health has apologised to medical card patients who have experienced delays but said the backlog was being cleared.
Reacting to a motion at the Irish Medical Organisation conference calling for an urgent review of the medical card application process, James Reilly said: “We’ve taken a lot of action in relation to this. The backlog has been reduced substantially – it was 54,000, it’s down to 4,000 and it should be cleared by the end of this month, so there has been inconvenience to patients for which I am sorry.”
He believed centralising the process would succeed as long as there remained a local input in terms of information around patients’ needs.