The Medical Council has said it cannot reverse its decision to refuse temporary registration to two junior doctors who are required to keep the accident and emergency unit at Wexford General Hospital open. Eithne Donnellan, Health Correspondent, reports.
Without temporary registration, the doctors cannot work in the unit and without them the unit faces closure next Monday, according to its administrator, Dr Ken Mealy.
The A&E department sees 24,000 new patients every year.
The South Eastern Health Board offered the junior doctors locum A&E posts for six to eight weeks after two non-consultant hospital doctors in the unit quit prematurely, one for personal reasons and one to take up a prestigious post in Britain.
The president of the Medical Council, Prof Gerard Bury, said yesterday the council could not row back on its decision. "It's not an option for us," he said.
"I mean I have huge sympathy with all of the institutions that are pressed for staff, but we have long since decided that expedient exceptions to core principles are not appropriate ways of either meeting the needs of patients or of doctors," he said.
He explained that temporary registration of non-EU doctors was for postgraduate training purposes. It was not for running hospitals, but the Irish hospital sector has become dependent on them.
Some 1,300 of the State's 3,000 non-consultant hospital doctors are from outside the EU, mainly Pakistan, India, Egypt and Sudan, and require temporary registration. This allows the Medical Council to establish their clinical and language competence. After registration they can take up approved training posts which are usually for a minimum of six months.
"Posts of very short duration are of limited training value," Dr Bury said.
"I think its a personnel issue for the South Eastern Health Board. There are clearly all sorts of routes open to them; for instance, the employment of fully registered doctors requires no permission from a postgraduate training body or from the Medical Council," he added.
However, such doctors are scarce.
Prof Bury said the system was "clearly creaking very badly" and he looked forward "very urgently" to the Hanly report on medical staffing in the health service due to be published soon.
"I believe it will make some fairly forthright statements about medical education in this country and will hopefully suggest some structures that will reform them," he said.
Despite Dr Mealy's claims that the unit will close next Monday unless the doctors get registration, the SEHB said it was still in discussions with a number of parties on the issue and was hopeful a resolution would be found.
The Independent TD for Wexford, Dr Liam Twomey, appealed to the Medical Council to reconsider its decision. "Any doctor is better than no doctor at all and therefore there should be some form of temporary registration made available in extenuating circumstances," he said.
"It's not acceptable to close an A&E department and put lives at risk simply to rigidly enforce guidelines," he added, before warning that similar problems could arise for all other A&E units at smaller hospitals across the State.
The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, is expected to meet Oireachtas members from Wexford this evening to discuss the issue.