'Are they going to Mars to find the plan?' - MLAs slam health officials for 'ridiculous timeframes' on GP appointments

The cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has launched a blistering attack on health officials’ response to a series of recommendations on improving access to GP surgeries in Northern Ireland.

15,000 people responded to a consultation on the issue, prompting a report from the committee last year, which set out proposals to improve the situation facing patients.

That department’s response to the proposals has been slammed by the SDLP PAC chair Daniel McCrossan, who accused health officials of treating the committee as “fools”.

“I don't know if whoever signed it off is considering this committee as fools, by hiding behind this illusion that they're doing something whilst doing nothing – by sticking ridiculous time frames on vitally important actions that they were committed to.

“It reeks of complacency. It's insulting to this committee and to the work and effort has been put in by countless people that contributed to this important inquiry, not least the 15,000 members of our public that responded to the consultation, who we were assured would have their voices heard in relation to how disastrous the access to GP services is across Northern Ireland”, the West Tyrone MLA said.

Mr McCrossan described the DoH response as infuriating, entirely unacceptable, and said it “reeks of business as usual”.

It relates to a report by the Public Accounts Committee last year, which said the actions by the health department (DoH) have been “piecemeal, uncoordinated and not driven by a strategic, long term plan”.

It had recommended both short and long term measures to make urgent improvements to access GP services. It called for an urgent workforce strategy for primary care; more work to understand patient experiences; addressing the variation in access throughout Northern Ireland; better oversight of access; development of new models of service delivery; better managing the use of locums; more urgency on the roll-out of e-prescribing and urgent evaluation of the roll out of multi-disciplinary teams.

However, the PAC chair – along with representatives of the DUP, Sinn Fein and Alliance – were scathing about the DoH response, particularly on how long it envisaged the proposed reforms would take.

Mr McCrossan hit out at the DoH for saying reforms on e-prescribing would take until 2030 to be completed.

“What on earth are they doing? Are they going to Mars to find the plan? I can't understand how they think that that is acceptable in any way, shape or form.

“There's already surgeries that are 10 times ahead of the department, 100 times ahead of department, that are implementing these things. There's there's examples of best practice that are there. You don't have to reinvent the wheel”, the SDLP man said.

“In relation to the workforce strategy for primary care... it’s going to take them until late 28/29… to implement that”, he added.

DUP MLA Diane Forsythe said she was “shocked at how wordy and waffly” the response was.

“The concise nature of our recommendations and the 15,000 people who responded to our survey were not taken seriously and it’s incredibly disappointing”, the South Down MLA said.

“This week we had coming out quite significant pay awards to senior health officials, whereas those on the front line are struggling with pay awards frozen. Are these the people that are being paid to write these wordy responses and that not actually deliver on the health care?”, she said.

Last week, the News Letter revealed that the health minister had signed off an unpublicised back-dated 5% pay rise for senior health service executives – which is “not dependent on satisfactory performance”.

The Department of Heath (DoH) says the pay and grading system is “fair, transparent, affordable and defensible”. It covers chief executives, executive directors and functional directors who operate at board level in the HSC system.