Taoiseach stresses role of health sector forum

THE Taoiseach yesterday said the best way to face the health service’s “complex challenges” was through the Health Sector Forum — but health professionals said he must primarily accept the failures of the HSE.

Brian Cowen told the IMPACT biennial conference in Kilkenny that he believed the forum could help facilitate a constructive dialogue between health management and staff which would make progress on the most important and complex challenges facing the industry.

“The forum should be developed to provide a new and inclusive process towards the design and realisation on the ground of the health service that our citizens want and deserve,” said Mr Cowen.

However, Kevin Callinan, national secretary of IMPACT’s Health and Welfare division said that while it was positive Mr Cowen was seeing the forum as a useful vehicle, as a concept the forum had already been around for almost two years and the pace of it over the past number of months had been slow.

“We need specific engagement by Government in relation to the HSE. There is a need for the Government to recognise that the HSE is not working as it was intended and some radical changes that need to take place. We are not just into a talking shop for a talking shop’s sake. There has to be some acceptance on the part of Government that there are problems. Not just problems with the pace of change and modernisation but structural problems with the way the HSE is operating.”

Earlier, Mr Callinan told delegates at the conference that “a quantum leap in thinking” was required to modernise the health services and that the health unions had to set the agenda to develop a service that was more accessible, more responsive and more flexible.

He said the Government would have to play a role, but from the start it would need to start listening to the real experts — the staff — and not management consultants.

One delegate, Paul Little of the Dublin South HSE branch expressed the frustration of thousands of his colleagues in the health industry.

“Tomorrow I celebrate 21 years in the health service having joined in 1987 at the height of the savage cuts,” said Mr Little. “Over the 21 years I have never been so disillusioned by the lack of support from and the actions of senior management in the HSE. Sometimes I feel like I am an actor in a movie — ‘’Drumm and Drummer’ or ‘Forrest Grump’. The situation is absolutely ridiculous.”

Next Wednesday, industrial action which will be taken by IMPACT’s 28,000 members in the health services in protest at the recruitment embargo. Mr Callinan said that action will be geared to maximise the impact on the top management responsible for the cuts.