PHYSIOTHERAPY GRADUATES are working in fast-food restaurants because they cannot get work. Yet patients are waiting up to a year for physiotherapy, the Oireachtas health committee heard yesterday.
Some 59 per cent of last year’s physiotherapy graduates are either unemployed, working in non-physiotherapy areas or have emigrated, Annette Shanahan, president of the Irish Society of Chartered Physiotherapists, said.
She said the graduates who completed the four-year degree, were working in jobs “from care assistants to Burger King”.
Only 16 per cent of 2007 graduates are in permanent employment and 42 per cent are not working in physiotherapy here. “It’s totally inadequate when we know that people need our services,” she said.
A survey carried out by the society last week found that the average waiting time for outpatient physiotherapy services in acute hospitals was 16 weeks but some people were waiting for a year.
Physiotherapists who were lucky enough to get work were left feeling demoralised and unmotivated because they were seeing patients who would have benefited from their help six months earlier, she said.
Ms Shanahan asked the Oireachtas committee to urge Minister for Health Mary Harney to recruit more physiotherapists for frontline services.
Fine Gael health spokesman Dr James Reilly said it was an “outrageous waste of money and an extreme example of poor management” that the talents of some of the brightest and best graduates were not used. The physiotherapists’ delegation also highlighted confusion among the public over the roles of physiotherapists and physical therapists.
Ms Shanahan said physical therapists were usually not healthcare professionals but one in three people did not know the difference.
The society’s chief executive Ruaidhrí O’Connor said he had a “burgeoning file” of cases on the issue. One medical consultant placed his father, who has a neurological condition, in a nursing home which, he was told, had a physiotherapist. However, he learned after several months that it was actually a physical therapist and he was alarmed that his father was not receiving the medical care he needed.
Also yesterday, Dr Alan Smith of the National Cancer Screening Service told the committee he fully supported the introduction of the cervical cancer vaccine.
Last November the Government abandoned plans to vaccinate all 12-year-old girls against the human papilloma virus (HPV) on the grounds of cost.
Dr Smith said the vaccine would complement the cervical screening programme recently introduced. “It’s not a case of one or the other,” he said.
He also said that bowel cancer screening would not be in place until at least 2011.
He said it had not yet got the green light and when it did, it would take two years to establish the programme.
Bowel cancer screening would target 55-74-year-olds and would be the first screening programme to include men, he said. That would present its own “unique challenges” as men were reluctant to attend such tests.
