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DOCTORS HAVE WARNED that general practice in Ireland is “on the brink of collapse”.
About 300 GPs attended a protest organised by the Natioanl Association of General Practitioners, in Dublin city centre this afternoon to voice their concerns about the current state of general practice funding and resources.
A number of those present said that the sector has been disproportionately hit by a 40% reduction in funding, compared to 14% for other health services.
Speaking at the protest, Dr Ruairi Hanley, a GP based in Drogehda Co Louth, told TheJournal.ie: “General Practice in Ireland is on the brink of collapse due to severe funding cutbacks over the last five years, which have resulted in devastating consequences particularly for younger GPs in smaller practcies who now find themselves financially unviable and are being forced to emigrate.”
He said that the closure of practices would led to patients “ending up on trolleys in A & E Departments”.
GPs have called for 2% of the overall health health budget to be diverted from secondary care to general practice. They denied this would result in other health services suffering, instead saying it would lead to a more efficient system in the long run as it is cheaper to treat patients at primary care level.
Dr Ciara Kelly, a GP based in Greystones Co Wicklow, said that general practice is “vital for poor, vulnerable sick people”.
“If it is gone, it is gone. It will not be easy to replace.”
Ahead of the protest Health Minister Leo Varadkar said he fully acknowledged “GPs are under pressure, both financially and in terms of workload”.
“The same problems are facing everyone in the health service. Nevertheless, more GPs are taking up contracts with the HSE. Latest figures show there were 2,416 GPs contracted to the HSE in April 2014 compared to 2,258 at the end of 2010.”
“The Government wants to increase resources to Primary Care as part of the transition to Universal Health.
“I strongly encourage GPs to seize the opportunity presented by the new contract negotiations and the proposal to extend GP care without fees to the under sixes and over 70s as the best way to get more resources into General Practice. It’s an opportunity that shouldn’t be lost,” Varadkar stated.
Hanley said that it was “very disingenuous of the minister to suggest that because of the opening up of the system to allow more GPs to get contract this somehow says everything is hunky dory, it’s quite the opposite”.
“On a contract you might have only 10 patients, you might have 1000 patients. So young GPs with those contracts are often sitting in practices that are financially unviable and in many cases they’re shutting them down and leaving the State,” Hanley noted.
He added that there is “a perfect storm developing of a manpower crisis and increased patient demand”. As well as young doctors emigrating, many of Ireland’s 3,000 GPs are nearing retirement age.
Hanley said that he was hopeful Varadkar’s appointment to the health department would signal a new era, adding it “wouldn’t be hard” for the new minister to do better than his predecessor James Reilly.
Leo Varadkar is clearly a very bright, able guy. He’s a GP himself although he more or less jacked it in at an early stage. I can’t blame him, to be honest about that one.
Hanley noted that in Ireland 2% of the overall health budget is spent on primary care, while the NHS spends 10% on the same services in Britain. He added that we would need about 1,000 more GPs to meet the European average.
Dr Andy Jordan, a GP in Tallaght, said that the lack of funding and resources available to doctors here had made Ireland “the laughing stock of Europe”.
“You cannot introduce a 40% reduction in funding and expect the services to remain the same,” Jordan commented.
Doctors at the protest were also opposed to free GP for under 6s and over 70s, saying it will remove vital private revenue and result in longer consultation times.
“GP care cannot be free and never will be be free,” Hanley said.
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It’s clear we don’t need to target domestic energy use. It is data centres that need to be stopped.
@Furious George – The Wasp: make them pay peak daytime household rates. 24/24h.
@Furious George – The Wasp: They get preferential rates…… https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/02/13/some-multinationals-pay-less-for-electricity-than-irish-smes-and-homes/
@another one? what’s going on is the semi state sec: outrageous
@Furious George – The Wasp:
Who here doesn’t use or need a data centre?
Social media, like photographs, video clips, Netflix, Spotify, WhatsApp, Tinder,your tap and go card, going to the doctor, hospitals, medical records, patient records, financial institutions, banks, restaurants for bookings, airlines for processing customer information, all use data centres.
Secondary storage is cheap, you can reduce your digital footprint by backing up your important files to memory stick or external hard drives instead of the cloud.
Not all data stored in a data centre is environmentally equal either.
Consider the difference between an online service which removes the need to use energy to travel to the service provider and the multiple storage of the same video content from a music concert.
@4g4mPnNi: there are 208 countries in the world. 16 of which are on the same latitude north of the equator. More north of us. I’m not bothered cou ting the countries with a similar latitude in the southern hemisphere. I guess my point is , why should they all locate here? Why do they take up so much of our usage while other countries have few or no data centres . They pay little tax compared to the normal worker . They get cheaper rates for electricity and cause a massive strain on our grid. Moderation should be the way foward .
@Furious George – The Wasp: comment written on a phone, while sitting watching Netflix just before you check your bank account balance all done before you go to bed so you can be up early for work where you have to send emails yadda Yadda yadda. Stop talking from yer whoop!!
@Thomas Meaney: Are you saying that the Internet would cease to exist if we didn’t have data centres in Ireland?
Government signed up to all of these unreachable climate targets. Now we’ll get fined billions for not hitting them. Money racket for someone, if ever there was one.
@Tony Murphy: How can we build hundreds of thousands of new houses (mainly for immigrants), fully dependent on electricity, and at the same time reduce our usage of electricity.
@Thomas Sheridan: We tie our own laces together, its sort of hilarious. ““The situation with transport will be very challenging as we will likely exceed the first transport sectoral ceiling by some considerable amount perhaps requiring a halving of annual transport emissions through the second period,”… like how? Stop people working?… Eamon Ryan literally asleep.
@Thesaltyurchin: on a positive climate related note, some large industrial users, like Intel, are on the verge of bankruptcy and closing down. Think of all the transport emissions savings as well when 6000 people stop travelling to work there.
@Thomas Sheridan: Horrid isn’t it… everywhere I’ve been governments a re mostly trying to move their people around to the benefit of their daily lives, weather its thousands of mopeds or state of art railways, but here it’s just all messed up, like the opposite or something.
@Thomas Sheridan: It has a 6% bankruptcy at the moment so it is unlikely!
@Thomas Sheridan: you don’t every house will have one hours esb and like it
We have no chance of meeting the government’s climate change targets when the government’s other policy is to grow the population at a large rate.
@Mark R: One of the biggest shames is the EU Marginal Pricing Policy which is directly responsible for the huge increases in electricity prices. Despite promising to remove gas from the policy, the EU has done nothing for the consumer who continues to pay extortionate rates for electricity.
Not one candidate brought this madness up in the recent EU election campaigns. Not one media asked any candidate a question about this policy.
It doesn’t matter how much renewable energy we produce, consumers are never going to see a cent in savings thanks to the disastrous Marginal Pricing Policy. That money will go to lining the pockets of vested interests.
Ireland needs to shift it’s energy policy to building nuclear and become self sufficient.
Record year for wind & solar energy output & Data Centres used up 80% of that increase, a red flag if ever there was one. Nobody shouting stop or calling for investigations into why the IDA, Councils & Eamon Ryan are ploughing the State headlong towards having most of Europes data stored here, putting our Grid infrastructure to the point of Blackouts & blowing our Emissions Targets out the window. Follow the Money !!! Households paying the highest rate for Energy in Europe & subsidizing behemoths like Goggle & Amazon, the whole scandal stinks. Ordinary families paying the price for our Govt being in the pocket of big business & 40 more Data Centres being built or in the Planning process, no real journalists left to expose it either.
@SV3tN8M4: If you’re looking for real journalists, you came to the wrong place.
@SV3tN8M4: They don’t care and The Green Party are Fine Gael on bikes. They screw over working families to ensure profiteers in big green industry can get away like bandits at our expense. The Greens just want to replace Big Oil with Big Wind. Same circus, different clowns.
Build the data centres in cooler climates with lots of renewable energy (hydro electric) like Sweden or Norway or Finland. We’re Full!
Electricity prices for household consumers
Highest electricity prices in Germany and Ireland.
@Dave Callaghan: imagine wanting something, that benefits the country’s economy, to halt growth. Are you on something??lol?? The issue is with the grid. We need to increase capacity. Simples!!!
@Darren Lynch: it doesn’t benefit our economy, that’s part of the problem. Better to build housing rather than data centres. They only benefit to the economy is the build phase.
I’ve worked in this space and very few jobs result from data centres. It’s best to build them in colder climates as suggested elsewhere in these comments.
Massive inroads have been made to make them more climate friendly but employment is very low in modern data centres. Invest in housing.
@Darren Lynch: you’re spot on
@Con Cussed: Few jobs but a lot of tax – easy to see why government likes them.
@Dave Callaghan: Lol! Sweeden and Finland are not nearly as desperate as we are.
There are 2 certainties in life : the Irish voting in a Fine Fail Fine Gael government and them making an absolute mess of the situation.
Wow another FFG success story.
Same as the ozone I suppose
If we’re fined by eu for being bold children the data centres should pay the fine and we’ll all wake up to electricity blackouts because of these same data centres other countries are not as soft as ireland but we give everything away cheaply
Electric car are also demanding if you consider they are also increasing. They want more taxes and try to justify it. Hybrid use petrol so will be taxed too. Corporations will not pay more for their data centre.
@Dominic Leleu: no compromise AND you have to pay extra, this is Irish politics. They’re giving away electric cars in the UK, but we cant touch them
@Thesaltyurchin: No they are not, they are selling cars interest free.
@Gary Kearney: true, *blushing skirt raised embarrassment!
So when will all this end. The way big business has a free ride on the backs of the bruses they create is staggering. Will a change in government end it,I doubt it. Wil mass demonstrations change it,I doubt it. The capitalists have taken over and you are just a tax number.
And what are the benefits of the data centres for us ?
Jobs ? Revenues ? Does that worth it ?
@Dominic Leleu: No benefit after initial build phase. Few jobs.
Good old French nuclear power to the rescue
Build nuclear power plants!
@Alan Kennedy: could you just imagine the fiasco of that,when you see the children’s hospital etc etc etc
@Alan Kennedy: Please don’t.
Why are targets always set up to fail?
@Telemachine: because we have a bunch of muppets running the country,when did any irish goverment ever hit a target? roads,schools,climate (that is the biggest scam in history) this list goes on and on its usually over budget and over time the only target thay can hit is tax take when they are shafting ordinary people.
They should only be allowed operator with their own generators.
@Dee: Great idea. That would be amazing for the environment!!!!lol!!!!
@Darren Lynch: Any new industry requiring massive energy usages should be required, as part of their planning requirements, to build renewable energy infrastructure to counteract their demand on the Grid. It shouldn’t be solely the responsibility of the grid.
@Susan: + Free access to Netflix and YouTube premium for all.
What about an A.I. government that operates purely on logic?
@Keth Tgi: AIs don’t operate on logic. Like many humans they tend to make things up.
One thing everyone needs to know – if we don’t build them here they’ll be built elsewhere and so there’s still an impact on the environment. If we don’t build them we lose out on investment and jobs..
@John Lee: There are few jobs. The return on investment is not there.
Now to force smart meter home users to reduce by screwing them in peak hours so the new joe soap will have dinner at 1 am. Do the washing at 4am ect car use will also be hammered mileage tax to reduce their emissions farmers will only grow trees but will they protect our fish stocks
May introduce a new green tax to at least offset this,problem solved
This is my concern, we are granting planning at a rapid pace for solar farms on the best of land. We are told its the best way forward. ARE WE SURE? solar farms are simply feeding the data centres. Not to mention the water consumption!. Can we not be more creative around location of solar farms and developing stronger policy around data centres.
We have the wind and waves and yet we do not push those recourses.
Green energy and as much as we want, who complain, the greens.
We have wide open bogs which could have wind generators, who complains the greens!
Wave generators, it could upset the fish or the birds.
It goes on and on!
@Gary Kearney: wind energy is the most expensive as we are going to find out when 40 euro per household goes on your bill to fund them
Let be honest governments and 1 percenters of Ireland and world dont give beep. Its less well off who try harder and are asked to suffer more so they can have little more. Be better world without internet i feel. But let s continue to do things without thinking how this going work. Thats what Irish government being doing for years. Thats why country is unstable as cost living out of control. But there good . Dont forget vote them back in next year.
have your say