Fighting to ensure that complaints against the HSE are properly examined
But these stories of neglect and cover-up remain hidden in primary care and community-based services.
The HSE has a considerable cohort of legal representatives eating up public monies (monies that could be better used in a failing health service, I say) defending managers’ positions of power.
This results in prevarication when questions need to be answered, with reports being delayed, inquires being drawn out and reports being hidden away.
I have found files not released under FOI within the legal framework of 20 days, patients not informed of moves taken against them; HSE professionals’ notes containing subjective, unsubstantiated rumour; inaccuracies that harm service delivery and ‘your say — your service’ complaints procedures that go nowhere.
As the investigators are HSE managers, the conflict of interest is apparent to any sensible person!
So many complaints end up with the Ombudsman, as they can’t get anywhere with the HSE’s internal system.
Sick, disabled and elderly complainants have neither the strength nor the where- withal to do all this.
Writing of my concerns to Minister Varadkar, I am told by him he is not “in charge of the HSE” and cannot influence how it is managed — a startling assertion by the Minister for Health.
Indeed he doesn’t seem even to want to know, as requests for meetings are refused.
It is time we all woke up to the abuses being perpetrated against sick, elderly, and disabled people in the community by the HSE; not just in residential care.
We need a community Hiqa now, urgently. The office of the confidential informant can’t be seen as independent as he or she is directly responsible to Tony O’Brien, director general of the HSE.
‘Victims of the HSE’, a new group of individuals, have united to form a platform for those harmed by HSE professionals and management, to press for an independent complaints system for all complaints against the service.
