Mary Harney and her media allies

The Progressive Democrats conference coincided over the weekend of 21-23 April with the IMO conference. Potentially an unhappy coincidence from the perspective of the PD leader, Mary Harney. Would excoriation tumbling from the IMO conference rain on her parade at the PD conference in Limerick?

She need not have feared.

On Saturday 22 April, the Irish Times ran a front page story based on Health Services Executive "spin". It cited seven factors that consultants had identified as contributing to the A&E crisis. The headline "Patients bypassing GPs add to A&E crisis" pointed the finger away from the direction of the Minister for Health, Mary Harney. The GPs were the blame. The Irish Times did not draw this inference but the following day, the Sunday Independent did. Its front page headline declared "Doctors to blame as sick flee to busy A&E". They supplemented this with a news story headlined "A&Es clogged up due to GP's 'rigid' practices", and an editorial headlined "Our GPs need to return to basics". In a second front page piece, Brendan O'Connor railed against the "medical mullahs", deriding doctors for being so self-important that their "junkets" get "reported in all the papers". (Incidentally the Sunday Independent published on 23 April four prominent attacks on doctors and not a mention of what the doctors were saying at their conference.)

The logic of the story went like this. Many patients report to A&E without having seen a GP first. If GPs worked longer hours, many of the patients who are currently clogging up A&E would see their GPs instead.

It doesn't take long to see how inherently ridiculous this argument is – the "Accident and Emergency" name gives the game away if you want to figure out why people might bypass their GPs. Better yet, the Sunday Independent included the actual evidence in their article: "even when out-of-hours cover was available, such as in Galway, this had no effect on admissions". That is to say that there is no correlation between out-of-hours cover and A&E admission rates, never mind a causation.

So, if the evidence in the articles flatly contradicted the headlines, what were they based on?

One of their sources was Mary Harney, who argued that if out-of-hours services were provided by family doctors instead of locums, patients would see them. This claim was unaccompanied by evidence and seemed to miss the obvious medical problem that human beings, including GPs, have a biological requirement for sleep, rest and recreation. The second quoted source which drove the headlines was a "stinging rebuke" from none other than veteran presenter Derek Davis.

On one side we have scientific evidence and basic logic. On the other side we have a speech at a political rally and a television celebrity's opinion. The latter grabbed the headlines.

Monday's broadsheets uniformly chose to highlight the PD's conference announcements on their front pages. Tucked away inside the Irish Times and the Examiner, we eventually found some brief reports of what the medical professionals had to say: the Government was refusing to allocate resources to public hospitals while liberally funding private hospitals – they have received almost 11 billion in tax relief, according to Dr Sean Tierney. As Dr Christine O'Malley, the new president of the IMO, pointed out, private hospitals do nothing to address the A&E crisis since emergency care is too expensive to be profitable.