Ellen Coyne
speaker
622 appearances
9 recordings
5 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 18 Jun
Ellen Coyne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And in both of those cases, the insurer, which happened to be VHI in both cases, refused to process the claim because the consultant was on a public owning contract.
The majority of consultant obstetricians at all three of the Dublin maternity hospitals are still on the old contract, which is why there might be some very confused pregnant women who have booked semi-private or private care with no barrier at all, because those people on the old contract are free to do public and private care
in publicly funded hospitals.
This will become a bigger issue as those people retire because anybody post, I think, 2023 is automatically on the new contract.
So that's why the Rotunda is picking this battle.
It's trying to fight this on principle, not for what's actually happening in the hospital at the moment, which is very minimal in terms of the impact of this, but because in the future, the Rotunda is fighting tooth and nail and has a lot of support privately in the other maternity hospitals to stop private care being removed from public maternity hospitals completely.
I mean, maternity is specifically different and the Irish Times has received a lot of anxious letters from women and I've had a lot of correspondence myself from women who are anxious that something will be taken away from them.
I think it's not super helpful.
I know Brenda Parr is talking about her own experience, but...
Talking about private care as a place where you get a private room to have a glass of wine is dramatically divorced from reality.
A lot of women who actually choose private care don't want the private room afterwards because maybe they're paying up because they have experience of miscarriage.
They've gone through IVF.
They've had a former experience of loss, so they actually want to be on a ward with other mothers and other babies.
The number one thing that women are paying for is continuity of care, in this specific case with a consultant.
However, there's a lot of women who would like continuity of care with a midwife.
But I think the nub of the issue that emerged this week, which I do not think has been addressed by the Rotunda or any of the consultants that have been advocating against this, is we will never have continuity of care for every woman, every pregnant woman in this country...
while private maternity care exists, because it is not in the interests of doctors to interrupt their own business model.
Continuity of care has to be an exclusive premium service for you to get people to pay €5,000 for it.
And from my discussions with consultants this week, many of whom do have private practices, I do not believe that it is impossible for the health service to offer continuity of care through a consultant or a midwife for everybody in the public system.
But it is impossible for that to happen while private care exists.
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