A Polish company is planning to open more private health clinics in Ireland as it has succeeded in attracting both immigrants and Irish clients, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, migration correspondent.
ON A basement floor insulated from the busy city street above, the clinic is abuzz with a bustle all its own. In the clean-lined reception area, all peaches and pinks and waiting room patter, a few women are leafing through the Polish papers scattered about on the table, a meek-sounding radio in the background. There's a small queue at the desk, but it's not moving fast because the phone seems to be ringing on a loop. "EMC," says the receptionist. "Dzien dobry."
Here on Dublin's Parnell Square is the hub of what Dr Jaroslaw Leszczyszyn calls his Irish "adventure", a first foreign foray for the private healthcare company he helped set up in 2000 and which now operates five hospitals and 12 outpatient clinics in his native country.
The Dublin centre, which opened last year, is something of a cross between a GP's surgery and a hospital outpatient department, staffed by Poles and Balts and offering the city's eastern and central European émigrés what he and his colleagues reckoned they would eagerly seek out: a familiar service in their own language.
To call it an adventure may connote a tinge of risk or chance, but if Leszczyszyn harboured doubts last year about the merit of opening the Dublin clinic, they will have been allayed by now. For EMC, a company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, the financial gain has been about as expected, but the patient numbers - anywhere between 30 to 70 on a given day - are higher than they anticipated.
The company opened a new clinic in Waterford last week, and plans are afoot for an operating theatre on Parnell Square as well as more new premises in Dublin and Galway.
The decision to open in Ireland involved more than sifting through the figures on Polish immigration, says Leszczyszyn, a Maltese resident who spends 10 days a month in Poland and works as clinical director on Parnell Square. Rather, it sprang from some assumptions about what Poles expected of the health service.
"Polish people expect to see a specialist for consultation," he says. "For instance, if an Irish woman is pregnant, she goes to the GP for check-up, for preparing for delivery, for all matters concerning pregnancy. A Polish woman is completely different. She knows that if you are pregnant, you should go to a gynaecologist, not to a GP, from the very beginning to the delivery. So we offer them the same kind of service they're used to using in Poland." The same is true across a range of ailments, he adds.
Every day there are two GPs on duty (one Lithuanian and one Polish), but there are also two dentists, a paediatrician, a gynaecologist and a surgeon in the building at any given time. A few times a week, patients can see a gastroenterologist, a urologist and a laryngologist. A consultation with a GP costs €50 while it costs €60 to see a paediatrician or a gynaecologist.
"So we can offer consultations and also small surgical procedures like skin marks, excisions, colonoscopy, gastroscopy, which are offered only in outpatient basis in hospitals . . . We can offer ultrasound examination, full laboratory blood testing, endoscopy, small surgical procedures."
All the clinic's doctors are recognised by the Medical Council - some as GPs with special interests (for example, in gynaecology), others as accredited specialists. Most were recruited from within the company's network in Poland, but others - such as Dr Piotr Wojcieckowski - have come from further afield.
"I like the atmosphere here, and I find satisfaction in delivering healthcare to my compatriots," says Wojcieckowski, whose last job was in Saudi Arabia, and now works between Parnell Square and Tallaght Hospital.
EMC's management admits that its success here is due, in part, to the business having veered down some unseen paths. For one, they expected a different type of patient. High Polish numbers in the building industry means there are lots of work injuries to deal with.
And because Polish immigrants are generally quite young, the majority of patients are between 20 and their late 30s, whereas in the outpatient clinics in Poland, the average age is about 50. That has meant a greater demand for paediatricians, children's play areas and gynaecologists (when they started, one of the two gynaecologists used to fly in for the weekend after working in Poland during the week, but now she works most of the week in Dublin).
Then there is the high proportion of non-Poles filing through the doors. Some 60 per cent of patients are Polish, another 20-25 per cent are a mix of Latvians, Lithuanians, Slovakians and Russians. And the rest, staff were surprised to see, are Irish.
Jaroslaw Leszczyszyn thinks the increasing Irish numbers are partly down to the city centre location, their seven-day opening hours and tips from Polish friends, but he believes the biggest attraction is the absence of waiting times. "I'm a gastro-enterologist and surgeon, and I know from my patients that in a hospital they have to wait, for instance, up to three months for a gastroscopy or colonoscopy. The same procedure is available in our clinic in a few days.
"You can walk in here and you can see a doctor straight away. They can see a doctor without any queuing up," adds Wojcieckowski.
Such waiting times explain EMC's decision to open the new clinic in Waterford last week. Unlike the Parnell Square centre, it will be aimed mainly at Irish patients, and it will specialise in dentistry because waiting lists for dental procedures in the city are long.
Of course, this also means that EMC's Irish business will be buttressed against any decline in the Polish population, a trend it expects to quicken as more young Poles are tempted home by a strengthening economy. But for every anecdote about someone returning, Leszczyszyn says there is another telling of his compatriots setting down firmer roots in their adoptive home.