Bernard Allen
Ceist:181 Mr. Allen asked the Minister for Health and Children the proposals, if any, he has to introduce guidelines on the way GPs should handle demanding and abusive medical card patients. [9546/00]
Written Answers. - Medical Card Patients.
Health boards are required to provide general practitioner services to all medical card patients and such services are provided by doctors holding GMS scheme contracts. The contract sets out both the conditions under which services are to be provided to medical card holders and the relationship between the board and the contracted doctor in terms of accepting and assigning patients.
In a population of more than one million medical card holders it is to be expected that some will be unduly demanding and problematic and while such cases are undoubtedly difficult on an individual basis all the evidence suggests that the number of such patients is very small.
While no formal guidelines have been issued by my Department, the matter of dealing with difficult or abusive medical card patients is one which the community care and primary care units in each health boards are best placed to deal with given their specialist local knowledge. In such cases, the units will generally work with the doctor or doctors involved to ensure the provision of a service and with the patient to see that he or she understands the importance of maintaining a mutually co-operative relationship with their general practitioner.