Officials and unions to meet on funding row

OFFICIALS from the Department of Health are to meet medical representatives today in the ongoing row over funding for two orthopaedic units in the west.

More than 70 staff were due to start work in one unit in Castlebar on July 1 but were told last week their job offers were being withdrawn as the fully equipped 33-bed unit would not now be opened. Many of them have started legal proceedings against the Western Health Board.

In the meantime a new 40-bed orthopaedic unit for trauma patients is also lying idle in the University College Hospital in Galway while surgeons struggle in what they say is a hopelessly outdated and overcrowded unit in Merlin Park Hospital.

Director of industrial relations with the IMO, Fintan Hourihan, said the discussions would centre on the serious mismanagement of the service.

A team of six surgeons currently services clinics in Mayo, Roscommon and Galway county as well as treating patients from the three counties in Merlin Park.

Non-emergency patients have to wait up to four years for surgery.

Following a major demonstration in Castlebar on Wednesday about the failure to open the unit there the IMO received a letter from the health board saying it would now open in September and contracts of employment would be honoured.

However, there was no mention of those who had received letters of employment.

IMO spokesman Dr Michael Thornton said they had received promises before that the unit would open, so they were sceptical about this latest undertaking.

The waiting lists for elective surgery, such as hip replacements, are long as surgeons have to spend so much time dealing with emergency trauma cases, Bill Curtain, one of the surgeons, said.

The solution was not just to appoint more surgeons or hospital beds but to provide sufficient resources throughout the service, he said.

Meanwhile, a retired surgeon Dr Joe Johnston has compared the Western Health Board’s handling of the delay in opening the Orthopaedic Unit at Mayo General Hospital to the Darby O’Gill School of Economics and Health Management.

He said the latest statement from the health board, “is like telling fairy tales to the little people but keeping the rainbow away from them”.