Tens of thousands of people are expected to join a mass rally in Dublin today to demand improvements to the public health service.

ORGANISERS of a rally for better healthcare being held in Dublin this weekend will be disappointed if at least 70,000 people do not turn up to demand better health services across the country.

Members of the public are being urged to come out on the streets to express anger at the state of the health service.

IN A shrinking economy, controlling the current pocket-lining arrangements is a priority. Medical inflation is not an act of God: it is a consequence of the “free market” in healthcare.

JANETTE BYRNE’S letter (‘Why they feared me — an ordinary person with cancer’, November 17) should be compulsory reading for all of us ordinary yobs when we feel defeated in the struggle to reclaim our country from the brazen, the arrogant and the smug who monopolise our airwaves, our news pages and our screens.

I WRITE in the wake of the uncertainty surrounding the exclusion of oncologist John Crown from the Late Late Show panel.

A BAN on staff recruitment to the health service is to continue for the month of November, the Health Service Executive confirmed last night.

WE write in the aftermath of a death foretold, the unnecessary death of a young Kilkenny mother from cancer.

EMERGENCY medicine doctors have claimed conditions in hospital A&E departments are returning to crisis point.

A PATIENTS’ support group has accused Health Minister Mary Harney of hiding behind the Health Service Executive in a bid to avoid the fall out of the authority’s cost saving measures.

A BABY boom at the country’s second largest maternity hospital has forced management to put up expectant mothers in a nearby hotel.

A major maternity hospital is being forced to rent hotel rooms for pregnant women because of a lack of beds.

IT seemed that a contingency plan put in place by management at the Mater Hospital in Dublin was working yesterday.

THE Mater Hospital has insisted no public money will be used to fund a threatened legal action against patient rights campaigner, Janette Byrne.

THERE was a time Janette Byrne couldn’t bear the thought of people seeing her bald head. Now she has put it on the cover of a book for all to see.

A NEW online ‘rate my hospital’ service which allows patients and their relatives to comment on their local facilities, was welcomed by patient campaign groups yesterday.

The Tánaiste and Minister for Health Mary Harney has dismissed claims that her mother was rushed into surgery ahead of two other emergency cases at Tallaght Hospital.

HEALTH professionals and opposition TDs have described the payment of a €32,000 bonus on top of a €400,000 salary to health service chief Professor Brendan Drumm as premature and incomprehensible.

Up to 100 people attended a rally outside the Dáil in protest at overcrowded conditions in the country’s Accident and Emergency units.

A group of 495 people will today lie on the street outside the Dáil to represent the highest number of patients lying on trolleys on a single day this year.

ALMOST 500 people are set to protest on Good Friday over the high number of people on trolleys in hospital A&E departments.

IT is now more than a year since the Tánaiste’s €70 million 10-point A&E plan came into operation, but there are huge divisions among hospital staff as to whether it is making any difference to A&E patients.

SERIOUSLY ill people waiting days on trolleys in overcrowded A&E units cannot be heard when they cry out for help, a patients’ lobby group has claimed.

A family expressed outrage tonight after a 67-year-old man was tormented during his last dying days by a person smoking in an overcrowded hospital ward.

THE Mater Hospital in Dublin says it is “extremely interested” in a plan to use empty beds in a nearby military hospital to alleviate overcrowding in its accident and emergency department.

A PATIENTS’ lobby group is urging employers to let their workers join with hundreds of nurses who will take to the streets tomorrow in a campaign to highlight overcrowding in hospital’s accident and emergency units.

NURSES are set to stage a series of strikes from next month over the Government’s failure to tackle the accident and emergency crisis.

PATIENTS will be charged up to €200 to attend the country’s first private casualty department which opens on Monday.

TÁNAISTE Mary Harney is facing her first real crisis at the Department of Health after hospital consultants and nurses yesterday threatened strike action.

NURSES are threatening to take industrial action unless Health Minister Mary Harney resolves the A&E crisis.

THE Irish Nurses Organisation have rejected a claim made by a senior Accident and Emergency consultant that its policies were putting patients at risk.

The Patients Together lobby group has accused the Government of failing to recognise the drastic effects that bed shortages are having on patients.

Evelyn Ring

Up to five hundred people marched to the Dáil in protest at the ongoing crisis in Accident and Emergency Units.

A new patients' representative group, Patients Together, will take to the streets of Dublin today to demonstrate over conditions at A&E departments across the country.

Nurses hit out at hospital management today accusing them of attempting to hide the escalating crisis in the country’s accident and emergency wards.

A NEW patients’ lobby group is disappointed the Tánaiste and Minister for Health Mary Harney has no quick-fix solution to the accident and emergency crisis.

Minister for Health Tánaiste Mary Harney has warned that there are no quick-fix solutions to the overcrowding crisis in A&E departments.

“MARY, get my granny off the trolley.”

A protest is set to take place outside Dublin's Mater Hospital this evening by family members of patients waiting to be admitted to the hospital.