Hospital waiting lists will worsen, warns IHCA
UHW's waiting lists may worsen, with concerns over weekend rostering in hospitals said to worsen hospital waiting lists across the country
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) has warned the Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill that "you cannot roster your way out of a capacity deficit".
The IHCA insists ministerial demands to push hospital consultants onto weekend rosters without providing essential supporting staff, diagnostics, or bed capacity will actively damage patient care and deepen the waiting list crisis across the country.
This could have a significant impact in Waterford, where over 3,600 people were recently reported as waiting up to 6 months for inpatient treatment at University Hospital Waterford, with an additional 603 people waiting for 18 months or longer.
With approximately 70% of consultants having signed the new Public-Only Consultant Contract (POCC), which includes Saturday work, the IHCA says while hospital consultants are willing to work weekends, they are not being properly supported to do so.
The 2023 contract, which pays consultants a basic salary of €233,527- €280,513, has been taken up by 3,483 hospital consultants across the country, according to a recent Department of Health presentation obtained by RTÉ’s Prime Time.
The presentation, dated June 30, 2026, confirmed the take-up rate for University Hospital Waterford (UHW) was 73%, in line with University Hospital Galway and higher than both University Hospital Limerick and University Hospital Tallaght.
"A consultant working on a Saturday without an operational radiology team, full laboratory support, or available step-down beds cannot discharge patients or run complex clinics," Professor Gabrielle Colleran explained.
"It simply shifts senior decision-makers into an empty room while stripping essential cover from Mondays, when the full hospital machine is actually built to run.”
The real bottleneck in the health service, according to the IHCA, is the "severe and chronic" shortage of consultants, diagnostics and beds, with Ireland significantly below the EU average for specialist doctors.
"You cannot roster your way out of a capacity deficit," said Professor Colleran, in a message to the Minister for Health.
"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."
The recent Department of Health report shows that in five out of six HSE regions, including the southeast, the percentage of consultants scheduled to work on Saturdays was 10% or lower in recent months.
Of consultants scheduled on Saturdays, 78% said they rarely or never have access to sufficient support staff outside normal hours, at weekends, and on bank holidays compared to the standard weekday in a recent IHCA members' survey.
The result of this, the IHCA says, is a consultant missing from the hospital on Monday, when patient demand is historically highest and the full hospital infrastructure is running.
"Consultant cover in Ireland is like a blanket on a hospital bed: if you pull the blanket up to cover the shoulders on Saturday, you leave the feet exposed on Monday," the IHCA warned.
