‘Harney would have lost job elsewhere’

HEALTH Minister Mary Harney would have resigned or been sacked from her position if she was in Government in any other country, according to one of the most distinguished medical practitioners in Ireland Dr Maurice Neligan.

The former consultant cardiac surgeon at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, said Ms Harney and the Health Service Executive are “living in cloud cuckoo land” if they believe patients are not suffering as a result of recent cutbacks in health spending.

He also said Ms Harney and the HSE chief executive Brendan Drumm have “alienated themselves” from doctors, nurses and all carers in the health service, which he said now values administrators more than it does sick people.

Dr Neligan strongly criticised Ms Harney and health authorities in a speech given in Ennis at the annual conference of Céifin — an organisation made up of religious and lay people that promotes debate on social change in Ireland.

Dr Neligan said health authorities were “wrong and immoral” for their attempts to “run-down” regional hospitals without first providing the “centres of excellence” that are promised.

He was speaking following suggestions made by Prof Drumm at the weekend that the misdiagnosis of seven breast cancer patients in Portlaoise was partly as a result of opposition to centralising health-services.

Dr Neligan said: “If they build the facilities, we will support them. They started running down hospitals such as Monaghan, where they stopped maternity services; Cavan, where they are not allowed to do certain surgery; and Portlaoise, and we have seen what happened there. They were shutting facilities where there was nowhere else for the people to go, and that’s wrong and that’s immoral and we should not hesitate to say that.”

He said many people are in favour of the centres of excellence, but just not the way reform is taking place: “First we need good ambulances, we need good roads, we need trained ambulance personnel, we need good paramedics.

When we have done all that, we’ve established all our stepping stones and we’ve established our centres of excellence, then we can turn to people in Monaghan or Portlaoise or Nenagh and say: ‘folks, we now have super hospitals down the road and it’s time we consider that’,” he said.

Dr Neligan also criticised the treatment of patients as “customers” and the running of hospitals like businesses: “All patients have one thing in common, the patient is scared, he’s sick, he’s sore and he’s frightened. That’s the person we should be looking after. This service is not looking at them in that way at all. They have become the gall bladder or the hip. They are not people anymore, they are dehumanised. It is truly appalling to hear a person who is in charge of the administration of this huge budget to refer not to patients, not to sick people, but to clients and customers. Medicine is not the same as a business,” he said.

Dr Neligan also said the priorities in the health system used to be patient first, doctors, nurses and other medics second and administrators third. “In Ireland today, we reverse that order. The administration comes first, more work for doctors and nurses comes second, and the patient loses all along the line.

Four years ago, the HSE had eight Grade A managers. They now have 800. They are so good at creating these jobs that they give each other a bonus. And meanwhile they shut down the services for the people on the ground.”

He said the planned co-location — building private hospitals on the grounds of public ones — is “more designed to suit the construction industry than the patient.”

He also said private hospitals are “going up like mushrooms.”

“Anyone who likes can build a private hospital. They can do that with tax breaks. There’s no control, there’s no inspection, there’s no peer review and there’s no audit as to what goes on in these places. Some of them are excellent, but they all share one thing. They are there to make money,” he said.

Dr Neligan also criticised recent HSE cutbacks, which he said are affecting patients on the ground: “We’re shutting the orthopedic unit in Navan for the month of December. The minister says only six patients will be cancelled, how she works that out I don’t know because they do about 120 cases a month, You can close things down, you can lay off staff and you can not take on any agency staff and then say patients won’t suffer. Well that’s living in cloud cuckoo land. Either the staff and the services weren’t needed in the first place, or you shut them down and people will suffer,” he said.