DOCTORS' CONFERENCE:THE IMPACT of the recession is being seen by GPs in their waiting rooms every day, with fewer fee-paying patients attending, according to doctors at the annual general meeting of the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP).
Dr Brendan Day, newly elected president of the ICGP, said the number of non-Irish nationals on his books had decreased because they have gone home, the number of medical card holders had increased and “we’ve also seen people who don’t have medical cards and whose income has dropped not being able to comply with their medications as much as they used to”.
These included children with asthma, people with high blood pressure and people with cholesterol problems whose “compliance wouldn’t be as good as it was previously because of the inability to pay for drugs that they had no problem paying for previously”.
He said GPs were also feeling the impact of the recession with the fees they are paid by the State having been cut but stressed the “hit that we’ve taken is so little compared to what we see in our waiting rooms every morning. The effect of the recession is so obvious with so many people unemployed.
“In the morning, there used to be queues of cars coming into Galway. That isn’t there any more,” he said. He practises in the Turloughmore/Claregalway area, about 16 kilometres from Galway city.
Asked if GPs had reduced their fees to match lower incomes as a result of pay cuts he said: “I think the great majority know their patients so well they know who can afford to pay and they tailor their fees accordingly.” Dr John Delap, the new chairman of the ICGP and a GP in Coolock, Dublin, said in general every discussion at the agm had referred to the economic situation where incomes in practices have diminished. “Some practices have reduced staff hours.
“Some practices have reduced doctor hours . . . and this is having a big impact on the services that practices can deliver to patients”.
The reduction in practice income resulted not just from a reduction in State fees, he said, but also from “a mixture of a reduction in private fees because people who have to pay aren’t attending the doctor as often. Other people are out of work and they attend and don’t have the money to pay and they don’t have a medical card either”.
He had noticed more people attending in a distressed state as a result of losing their jobs or members of their families losing their jobs. “Often people will present with symptoms of stress-related illness but the difficulty is that if that distress continues then people will become exhausted, and more ill and unwell and some of them will become depressed and that’s what I expect is likely to happen over the next year or two. More significant mental health problems and mental illness is likely to result over a period of time.”
Meanwhile, the HSE’s director of quality and clinical care Dr Barry White told the conference there were “quality and access deficits” in the healthcare system which needed to be fixed but “we don’t have any more money”.
He said 70 per cent of healthcare spending went on managing six chronic diseases like diabetes and stroke and if the patients with these conditions weren’t managed better they could “sink” the healthcare system over the next decade. If they were better managed lives and money could be saved, he added.