Part-time hospital consultants should be recruited to increase staffing levels in hospitals, a conference on Irish hospital care was told yesterday.
Prof Brian Keogh, immediate past president of the Royal College of Physicians, said the move was one of a number needed to make hospital work more attractive to doctors.
Irish doctors were becoming increasingly less attracted to hospital work for reasons which include frustration on the part of patients when their expectations were not met, he said.
Part-time consultancies would be attractive to both men and women. There were many women doctors who would be unable to take up full-time consultancies because of family commitments.
The ideal would be that people could work part-time for some years and then return to full-time work. Part-time consultants would in no way be second-class citizens, he said. They would carry out all the teaching and medical roles of their full-time colleagues.
The conference was organised by the Centre for Insurance Studies in UCD.
Private healthcare was about giving people what they wanted, Dr Mark Pauley, Wharton School of Business in the US, told the conference. He questioned the value of the system of community rating in which all members of schemes such as the VHI and BUPA paid the same subscription regardless of age.
The fact was that people could plan to provide for bigger insurance premiums as they got older. He suggested the Government should consider giving "health vouchers" to citizens which they could use to buy private or public healthcare as they wished.
A survey financed by BUPA Ireland and conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute reveals a relatively low level of faith in the public hospital system, according to the details released at the conference. A minority, 44 per cent, of respondents described the quality of care in the public health system as good or very good but 83 per cent placed the private health system in this category.
Questioned in more detail about the public health system, the rating of good or very good was given to the quality of medical care by 52 per cent and to the quality of facilities by 44 per cent. For the survey, 3,000 people were telephoned and 61 per cent of these took part.
Asked if they would favour compulsory private health insurance for people over a certain income limit, with exceptions and allowances for those who could not afford it, 62 per cent said they would. The highest levels of support came from skilled manual (70 per cent) and unskilled manual (68 per cent) people.
The lowest level of support for compulsory health insurance came from people in the professional/managerial (49 per cent) bracket.
More than 95 per cent of respondents said they would be in favour of the Government substantially increasing the amount it spends on the public health system to reduce waiting times and improve the service it provides.
Commercial pressure for results could push research scientists into doing things "which override human life", said Prof Michael Ryan, professor of social ethics at the Pontifical University in Rome. "The scientist is no longer free," he said. Tens of thousands of patents have been applied for by companies in genetic and other advanced areas of research, he said. Research guided by ethical considerations was seen as too slow by companies seeking big profits. "The speed that is being imposed is being imposed by commercial interests."
pomorain@irish-times.ie