Consultants have opposed Health Minister James Reilly's plan to publish clinical outcome rates, including patient death rates, for individual specialists.

The Minister told the MacGill Summer School yesterday that there is currently little or no publicly available data to allow people to judge the quality of care that they receive and make informed decisions.

He said he intends to publish on the internet in future individual consultants' patient waiting lists, morbidity (illness) and mortality figures.

However, the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) said today the Minister’s plan to publish morbidity and mortality rates for individual consultants 'will not in its proposed form help patients to make informed decisions.'

"Healthcare is increasingly delivered by multidisciplinary teams, often across different hospital sites within networks. To link morbidity and mortality to one particular factor or individual  involved in a patient’s care may not be the most appropriate way to reassure patients of the safety of their hospital or hospital group."

The IHCA said it was in favour of patients receiving all information relevant to making an informed decision about their care programme.

"We welcome the Minister’s proposal to publish waiting list figures for individual consultants, which will provide further evidence that the demands on our healthcare system currently exceed the capacity available."

There is considerable resistance in the medical profession to any plan to link treatment outcomes to individual specialists.

Recently, a planned audit of mortality following surgical procedures was delayed due to concerns over  confidentiality and data protection issues.

The Irish Audit of Surgical Mortality, run by the College of Surgeons and the HSE, would involve surgeons reviewing the outcomes of procedures undertaken by their colleagues.

However, there were concerns that individual surgeons and their performance could be identified publicly under the system through Freedom of Information or document discovery in legal cases, or that surgeons reviewing their colleagues' work could be identified.

These difficulties are currently being looked into by the HSE.

Those running the audit said that with this type of exercise, the public's right to know had to be balanced against the need to have 'buy in' by surgeons into the process.

They said said 95% of surgeons would be happy to engage with the audit of their performance provided confidentiality issues were addressed.

View the only publicly available data where patients can assess quality of care in hospitals, our Rate My Hospital Service here