The final general motions session has just ended, and with it comes a rather subdued end to what had the potential to be the most important AGM in years.
Perhaps it was the disastrous decision to separate doctors from journalists in two hotels. People talk about gathering at the bar after the meetings with an air of flippancy, but in fact the bar is where most of the work is done by journalists.
The day began with the unexpected news that the national consultants committee meeting would be closed not for 30 minutes, as was told to the media, but for more than two hours. If doctors have any hope of credibility when it comes to calling upon the HSE to be more transparent, closing doors to journalists (except in matters of the most obvious privacy) is unadvisable.
The messages consultants were giving before the meeting was closed were the kinds of message that must get to the public – specific cases of poorly resourced facilities, insidious loopholes in HSE policies and developments, a general sense of giving a damn.
The overall tone of the last day was a little hung over, not from alcohol but – it seemed – from the short-lived romance between doctors and Mary Harney, who only the day before had stood before them with nothing new to say, but she said it very authoritatively. There was long applause after her speech. For what?
The situation has not changed. While uncontroversial aspects of the consultant contract are being ironed out peacefully, the sides are as entrenched as ever on the big issues.
Well, maybe not, but how would we know, as the consultants meeting was closed?
The ads for new consultant posts are coming. Mary Harney doesn’t really back down from threats, unless she gets enough of what she wants. There’s the Medical Practitioners Act – which includes the end of self-regulation and risks forever deprofessionalising medicine – looming difficulties with the GP contract, co-location, primary care teams, flexibility, and so on and so on.
From where I’m standing, this is what the future looks like: ugly. Still, doctors in the IMO are committed to their patients and, importantly, the defence of moral and the ethical standards in medicine, even though all around them the market threatens to yank out all the dignity of being a doctor.
And I can imagine that it leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth to believe that you are acting in the interest of others and then to see in headlines – following Harney’s speech – Minister losing patience with doctors. How, exactly, has she done her part to insure that negotiations reach a settlement that is best for patients, except to force a contract down the throat of the profession, a contract which could see many docs farmed out as cheap labour to enrich for-profit hospitals in a co-location scheme that has neither been planned nor has the inarguable support of the public?
The final general motions sessions should have been renamed The General Motions Session That Would Never End. No red light (a little bulb which signified the end of debate time) was ever so ignored. At times I felt as helpless as the red bulb, as doctors – who clearly had no read or thought of the motions in advance – fumbled around petty rewordings of the very obvious.
Dr Mick Molloy is an effective speaker. So is Mr Asam Ishtiaq. The rest could use some coaching.
It was mentioned by Dr Sean Tierney, the consultant chairman, that one of the reasons doctors get whipped around by the Minister in the news is that they don’t yet know what they know. Nevermind the lack of dialogue between doctors and health service managers. What about dialogue and agreement amongst doctors themselves?
Still, there’s something reassuring about the fact that many of the same motions the IMO passed three years ago, when I made my first trip to Killarney, are still being argued as though doctors made them up yesterday. Imagine how easy it would be to stop caring and just get rich.
About Greg Baxter
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