{"id":612960,"date":"2026-09-03T06:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T06:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/612960\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T06:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T06:16:09","slug":"clinical-and-economic-insanity-hospital-consultants-hit-out-at-ministers-push-for-weekend-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/612960\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Clinical and economic insanity&#8217;: Hospital consultants hit out at minister&#8217;s push for weekend work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Irish hospital consultants have lashed out at health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill\u2019s push to make them <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.irishexaminer.com\/news\/arid-41622085.html\"> work more weekend shifts<\/a>, decrying the move as \u201cclinical and economic insanity\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) said forcing consultants to work on Saturdays would cause operational difficulty on Mondays, when patient demand is typically highest.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">About 70% of consultants working in Irish hospitals have signed a new public-only consultant contract, which pays \u20ac231,000-\u20ac277,000 a year. Consultants can be asked to work Monday-Saturday as part of a core 37-hour work week.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Recent figures from the HSE show one in seven consultants were working on Saturdays.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Ms MacNeill has made it a pillar of her tenure as health minister to drive consultants towards working more weekend hours.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">The minister had given the consultants a deadline of the end of July to increase uptake in weekend shifts, and previously said there were \u201ca series of tools\u201d to escalate the situation if consultants did not comply.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">IHCA president Gabrielle Colleran said the minister\u2019s push for weekend work represented a \u201cpolitically driven illusion of progress\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">&#8220;Shifting a severely scarce clinical workforce from high-productivity Mondays to low-support Saturdays, where basic access to diagnostics, allied health, and community step-down beds is virtually non-existent, is bordering on clinical and economic insanity,\u201d Ms Colleran said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Ms Colleran claimed the root of issues in the country&#8217;s healthcare system was a severe lack of working consultants.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">The average number of working consultants in Ireland is about a third lower than the EU average, according to IHCA.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\u201cIf the minister wants a functional six- or seven-day health service, she must first provide the beds, the diagnostics, and the support staff required to run it,\u201d Ms Colleran said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\u201cForcing frontline clinicians into unworkable weekend schedules is a political distraction that treats patient safety as an afterthought.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Irish hospital consultants have lashed out at health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill\u2019s push to make them work more&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1111,103,397,396,61,60,43,1112],"class_list":["post-612960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-court-and-crime","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-politics-and-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}