Dr. Suzanne Crowe

The difficulty in obstetrics is that there is no private site.

Yeah, largely because of indemnity.

Mount Carmel Hospital closed over 10 years ago and it was due to the rising cost of indemnifying obstetrics.

If you were to pay for private indemnity, it would cost somewhere close to a quarter of a million euros.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, and the state picks up the indemnity costs for obstetrics, but also for a couple of other quite high risk specialities, such as high risk spinal surgery, neurosurgery and eye surgery.

So the state steps in because it would just will be economically impossible for an individual doctor to cover the indemnity costs.

I suppose the specialities where there's interventions that are billed individually, that's where you see people making large sums of money.

So things like obstetrics, surgical specialities, radiology, where they're billing per procedure, they tend to be the higher earning specialities.

No, it doesn't sound outlandish, no.

I think it is actually improving health care.

Yeah, I think it means that the consultant hours and actually the specific time they're spending in contact with patients is much more closely monitored on the new contract.

And that is good for patient care.

The previous consultant contracts had a lot of autonomy and the new consultant contract is a move away from that.

You're an employee and you have specific, I guess, guardrails around that.

There is.

However, there haven't been similar changes made to the contracts to a lot of the supporting people within the hospitals.

And so it's different.

It's difficult to ramp up care without all the additional team members present.

That's true.