Irish Health System for Dummies I – General Information

Hi Expats,

For those who are coming from countries where to go to the doctor is free, the first experiences with the Irish Health System can be a bit shocking and confused, sometimes, even the locals are note able to explain you how it works :), and it takes a time to get a good understanding about it.

The aim of this posts is to explain briefly and clearly (I’ll try my best) based on my personal experience how the health system works for those families with neither a medical card nor a private health insurance nor an European Medical Card, we’ll try to cover these exceptions in another topics.

So, no medical card, no private insurance, no European medical card, ok? And we need to go to the doctor right?. I’ll simplify it in two main areas:

1. Primary Care (you have to pay, there are exceptions**).

Within the primary care there are a few options:

1.1   General Practitioners or Family Doctors (http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/list/2/gp/) .  They work Mon-Fri business hours. In other countries they assign you a family doctor, in Ireland not, here you have to choose your family doctor.

• Visit Fee  = 50 €

1.2   South Doc (http://www.southdoc.ie/) : They work 7 days a week from 6pm to 8am, basically they cover the out-of-business hours of Family doctors.

• Visit Fee = 60€

1.3   Hospitals Emergencies Departments: They work 7 days 24 hours.

• Visit Fee = 100€

2. Hospital Attention and Specialists Consultants. (Free when you are referred by a primary care body). But….. if for some reason you have to overnight in the hospital (hopefully not), guess what? Yes, you have to pay!

• Hospital nightly rate = 75€ with a limitation of 750€ per year, it means you just pay the first 10nights in a hospital.

An Irish friend once told me: “Ireland is not a good country to get sick”, definitely not!

**As mentioned before there are a few exceptions that comes to my mind where the attention is totally free:

• GP visits, nurse checks and hospital consultants related with the pregnancy period.
• GP and nurse scheduled health checks for babies.
• That´s will be new in 2014, free GP Care for all child under 5 years.

I hope you find the post useful and helpful. That said, all the information above comes from my family experience with the health system in Ireland, some of the things I mentioned  may have changed, or even the fees might be lightly different, so my recommendation is  always to double check it using the official HSE websites: www.hse.ie & http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/health/

Hopefully somebody else can share her/his experience using either a Medical Card, a private health insurance or the European Medical Card.

Stay tuned!!

Cheers,