Martin backs plan to centralise acute care
Former health minister and current Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin said yesterday, Cork and Kerry “had to be looked at as one single care system”.
He said surgeons in the region had endorsed the proposal to carry out all acute surgery at Cork University Hospital (CUH) and they were the experts.
“The surgeons are leading the way. We have to listen to them... I think there has to be a certain degree of common sense and a pragmatic approach as such. All of the hospitals will continue to do significant amounts of surgery, but in terms of on-call, it will be CUH.”
The transfer of all acute care to CUH is a key recommendation of the report by consultants Teamwork Management Services, commissioned by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to devise a plan for the future delivery of acute services in the HSE South.
The unpublished report recommends CUH be the sole provider of acute care in Cork and Kerry, but Prof John Higgins, who is overseeing the reconfiguration project, said Kerry will retain all its acute services, including A&E.
On Wednesday Councillor Michael Healy Rae, son of Independent TD Jackie Healy Rae, said his father had threatened to withdraw support from the Government if Kerry General was downgraded and that he had forced the Government into a U-turn. He produced a letter from Health Minister Mary Harney, dated May 20, giving assurances that Kerry would keep acute care. However, a spokesperson for Ms Harney said she was merely re-iterating an assurance given two weeks ago by Prof Higgins to all politicians from the south at a Leinster House briefing.
While Kerry is set to retain its A&E, the futures of the A&E at the Mercy University Hospital and South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital in Cork are uncertain. Their fate will be decided by a second report examining A&E services.
“They’ve developed a good system in the Mercy, and we wouldn’t want to lose that,” Mr Martin said.
Green Party Senator and European election candidate Dan Boyle said he had “mixed feelings” about the leaked recommendations.
He accepted the principle of centralising some services but that centralising all acute care, particularly accident and emergency, might be “going too far”.
“My perception is that an A&E is required in the city centre given the type of instances that occur in a city at night. Having to travel to Bishopstown to an A&E is not ideal,” Mr Boyle said.
Dr David Molony, a Mallow-based GP, and one of a group of 100 GPs who wrote to Ms Harney asking that Mallow retain 24-hour medical and surgical consultant delivered care, said they were not afraid of change but medicine was based on the principal that everything must be evidence-based. “As yet, there is no evidence to show that what is being proposed is going to be any better than the existing service and because of that, we are apprehensive,” he said.
