The rules are simple, says Dr Garrett FitzGerald, and you can apply them every year: very cold weather in winter plus respiratory pathogens equals chaotic trolley numbers.

Funding for the HSE’s purchase of Mount Carmel Hospital in Dublin, at a cost of €11 million, is to be provided for from the Executive’s yet to be published capital plan for this year, IMT reports.

The Minister for Health has refused to rule out co-payments by GMS patients for GP visits.

The emigration of GPs from Ireland is real, the ICGP has maintained, while refuting the representation of GP cover made in a recent article published in a national daily newspaper, which cast doubt on the exodus of the doctors.

The first and only wholly online Masters in Public Health degree programme to be offered on the Island of Ireland was launched at Brookfield Health Sciences Complex, College of Medicine and Health, UCC, last week.

The Government must immediately abandon all co-payment models such as prescription charges, which are proven to be detrimental to long-term health and disproportionally affect the most vulnerable in society, the IMO has said.

The national contact point for the European Network for Patient Safety and Quality of Care (PaSQ), HIQA, is hosting a conference ‘Health and Social Care Priorities for Ireland — Learning with Europe’, on Thursday, October 2.

Medicines regulators, jointly led by Ireland’s Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA), are to work together internationally to find innovative solutions to facilitate evaluation of and access to potential new medicines to counter Ebola outbreaks, the interim International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) has said.

Children are to be temporarily seen in prefabricated buildings to facilitate the roll out of bilateral cochlear implants to paediatric patients, which will require the virtual doubling in staff capacity of the National Cochlear Implant Programme at Beaumont Hospital, IMT reports.

The NAGP has called on the Government in its pre-Budget 2015 submission to set up a specific ‘transfer to primary care’ programme addressing the moving of hospital services into the community and to implement a targeted investment programme in the sector.