asked the Minister for Health if he will make arrangements whereby medical card holders are free to consult a doctor who has not opted into the choice of doctor scheme while being free to collect their prescriptions at the local chemist.
Ceisteanna—Questions. Oral Answers. - Medical Card Holders.
27.
The great majority of general medical practitioners, 1,140 out of approximately 1,400, are participating in the new scheme and, in most areas, eligible persons have available to them a reasonable choice of family doctor. I would not, therefore, feel justified in making the arrangements proposed by the Deputy. Nevertheless, where there are special circumstances, it is open to a health board to authorise an eligible person attending a non-participating doctor to have his prescriptions dispensed without charge at a local pharmacy.
May I ask the Minister if making this sort of arrangement with a doctor who has not opted in would create any great difficulty for the Department of Health? It does not seem to be a difficult thing to arrange. Is the Minister aware that there were a limited number of doctors who were not able to undertake a full practice, but were doing quite a good limited local practice and had their own patients? These people are now left out in the cold because the doctors in question were not able to opt in for full practice.
Arising from the negotiations which took place, we informed health boards that they are free, in certain exceptional circumstances, to permit an arrangement of the kind referred to in the question. This is generally confined to certain elderly medical card patients who have been patients of a private practitioner for a long time and who did not get into the scheme because of over-age. We applied the idea to those classes of people. Incidentally, if any Deputy has any other examples which might justify some slight increase in the scope of the scheme I will be glad to hear of them. We do not want to increase the scope of the scheme beyond those limits.