The plight of junior hospital doctors, some working up to 120 hours a week, was described as a scandal by the chief executive of the Irish Medical Organisation, Mr George McNeice.
In his address to the IMO annual conference yesterday, Mr McNeice said the hours worked by the doctors constituted a hazard, not just to the health of doctors but to the safety of patients.
"We are pilloried as scaremongers. Yet it is in just this language that the issue was recently described by a senior member of the European Commission," he said.
The entitlement of citizens to access, on a 24-hour basis, to high quality medical care was not in question, he said. However, the capacity of any individual doctor to provide such care was at issue.
"The hours regularly being foisted on young doctors and their patients constitute a continuing and serious hazard for both. Clearly, of course, the reluctance to address this issue is not based on any failure to recognise the problem, but rather an unwillingness to fund the solution."
It was wrong, he said, that patients were being consigned to the care of doctors "who at times can only be operating at an unacceptably low level of clinical efficiency and effectiveness. Other countries seem to manage their health services without compromising the well-being of patients and younger doctors - why shouldn't we?"
On health funding, Mr McNeice said the Government might point to increasing health expenditure in recent years, but as a percentage of overall economic growth, the increase had been "modest indeed".
It was unreasonable that some of the benefits of the recent economic boom had not been passed on to patients and particularly to the least fortunate among them. "Given the economic boom and the growth in the population, more people, who are just outside of General Medical Scheme eligibility but experience financial hardship, should receive medical cards," he said, adding that the medical card scheme was under capacity by 200,000 people.
"At the very least it would seem reasonable to adjust the eligibility limits for medical card entitlement to include the full number which the scheme as currently conceived can accommodate - 40 per cent of the population."