Some two-thirds of patients say the "morning after" pill should be made available in the Republic without prescription, prize-winning research presented at the annual meeting of the Irish College of General Practitioners has found. But 67 per cent of doctors said the pill should not be available over the counter.
Dr Fionnuala Murphy, a registrar with the Cork general practice training scheme also asked 170 patients whether the effectiveness of the "morning after" pill was related to when it was taken.Some 88 per cent of respondents correctly said the pill's efficacy was related to time.
And 91 per cent, half of whom were aged less than 30, knew the 'morning after' pill offered no protection against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The doctors surveyed said they mainly prescribed emergency contraception to teenagers and women aged between 20 and 30.
Asked why they did not agree with the over-the-counter availability of the "morning after" pill, doctors said to do so would mean losing the opportunity to educate patients about the risk of STD.
Meanwhile, separate research carried out by Dr Joan Mulqueen and her colleagues from the Western training programme in general practice, has found that almost one in 10 family doctors were carriers of Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus (MRSA).
In the first study of MRSA nasal carriage rates among GPs in the Republic, some 7.7 per cent of the 78 doctors surveyed tested positive for the so-called "superbug".