Changes in consultant rosters will not fix the capacity deficit in the health service, the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) has warned.
With around 70 per cent of consultants having signed up to the public-only contract, Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has called on hospitals to roster more specialists on Saturdays, as per the conditions of the pay agreement.
However, the IHCA said the rostering of consultants to provide normal scheduled care at weekends is unworkable without additional staff within the system.
“A consultant working on a Saturday without an operational radiology team, full laboratory support, or available step-down beds cannot discharge patients or run complex clinics,” said IHCA president Prof Gabrielle Colleran.
“It simply shifts senior decision-makers into an empty room while stripping essential cover from Mondays, when the full hospital machine is actually built to run.”
She pointed to a shortage of consultants, beds, and lack of access to diagnostics as ‘the real bottleneck’ in the health service.
Insisting on the provision of forced weekend routine care in an under-resourced system represents a ‘politically driven illusion of progress’, the IHCA president added.
A recent IHCA members’ survey found that 78 per cent of consultants ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ have access to sufficient support staff (including pharmacists, phlebotomists, radiographers, administrators, and hospital management) outside normal hours, at weekends, and on bank holidays at the same level as standard weekdays.
“You cannot roster your way out of a capacity deficit,” said Prof Colleran. “Shifting a severely scarce clinical workforce from high-productivity Mondays to low-support Saturdays, where basic access to diagnostics, allied health, and community step-down beds is virtually non-existent, is bordering on clinical and economic insanity.”
Citing her own example, as a consultant in paediatric radiology, Prof Colleran said that operating alone on a Saturday to perform ultrasound scans, she can scan 16 children at a maximum.
However on Monday, with a full multidisciplinary team including three sonographers on site, around 50 scans can be completed.
In a statement, the IHCA added that ignoring the efforts of those doctors who often work unpaid overtime and refusing to formally engage with the organisation since March 2025, is a ‘staggering failure of political leadership’.
“If the Minister wants a functional six or seven-day health service, she must first provide the beds, the diagnostics, and the support staff required to run it,” Prof Colleran added.
“Forcing frontline clinicians into unworkable weekend schedules is a political distraction that treats patient safety as an afterthought.”
Original source: ie