The organisation representing key laboratory specialists has warned against testing services for family doctors being taken out of public hospitals and moved to stand-alone laboratories, some run by the private sector.
At the Association of Clinical Biochemists' annual conference in Dublin today its president, Dr Alan Balfe, said such a proposal had been made in an unpublished review for the HSE.
The proposal calls for a major rationalisation of services taking testing for GPs out of the public hospitals and establishing three new stand-alone facilities around the country.
Dr Balfe warned that this would fragment the health service and that public hospital laboratories need to be on a level playing field with the private sector.
The unpublished but widely leaked 'Teamwork' report recommends that the existing network of around 40 hospital laboratories be replaced with a much smaller number of advanced new facilities, based at between eight and 14 acute regional hospitals.
The HSE said the report was still being finalised but that it would be published in a few weeks.
It said that there was some duplication of public hospital laboratory services and the system needed to be modernised and reorganised to ensure a quality service was in place.
Dr Tracey Cooper of the Health Information and Quality Authority told the conference that good guidelines had been issued to laboratories in the past year to help keep errors down and to improve patient safety, but this alone was not enough.
She said laboratories must have the right staff and face audit and accreditation.
