Up to two consultants a month quit
Dr Peadar Gilligan, chair of the IMO consultants’ committee, said it was a “nationwide phenomenon that needs to be taken very seriously by the HSE”.
He said it was “almost unheard of when I took up my post, for people to resign from a consultant position”.
“Now I see it. And I sit on the consultant application advisory committee and we deal with resignations every second month or so.”
The committee, set up by the HSE, provides independent advice on applications and qualifications for consultant posts.
Dr Gilligan, an emergency medicine consultant in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital, said the 30% cut to the salaries of new entrants introduced by former health minister James Reilly in 2012 was largely to blame.
“People feel ‘I do the same job as my colleague who was appointed before 2012 and he’s getting paid more in that job than I am’.
“I teach senior trainees as part of my job — and to see the impact it has on their morale. When I ask them what they are going to do about it, they say ‘We’re leaving’. And that has turned out to be the reality. They have left and many of them have no intention of coming back,” Dr Gilligan said.
Resignations were across age-groups and specialties, but particularly in the area of child and adult psychiatry, reflecting under-resourcing, he said. Indeed people were no longer attracted to the profession, according to Dr Matt Sadlier, consultant psychiatrist at Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown.
Dr Sadlier said the notion that a vacancy would not attract multiple applications was not one that existed when he was applying for jobs.
“The concept that it wouldn’t be hotly contested, the concept that a vacancy wouldn’t have 20 applicants didn’t exist,” he said.
Yet the website publicjobs.ie is littered with adverts for consultant psychiatrists (22 in all, eight for child and adolescent psychiatry), including one post advertised since February 2016. There are currently c370 vacant consultant posts nationally.
Dr Gilligan and Dr Sadlier were speaking on a motion at the IMO’s AGM at the weekend, calling on the Government to enter negotiations on a new consultant contract that will eliminate the two-tier pay structure.
A separate motion proposed a 30% reduction in the pay of new TDs “to match that imposed on newly appointed consultants who unlike TDs are hard to attract”. Both motions were carried.
