Harney must be held to account for chaos in health system

POOR Mary Harney – those damned doctors have been ruining it for everyone again as they deliberately vandalise the health service.

She insists the €9.1 million cutbacks at Crumlin Children’s Hospital and the resultant ward and theatre closures, the 8,483 cancelled outpatient appointments, and the pain and suffering inflicted on children are nothing to do with her – how could they be, she’s only the Minister for Health and Children after all?

No, it is all the work of sinister, underhand forces seeking to destroy the system from within.

“I find it strange that when we ask hospitals to make efficiency savings, some hospitals decide that the most sensitive area is the one that must be cut,” Ms Harney told the Dáil in a calculated and vindictive attack on the staff struggling to save lives as the country’s biggest children’s hospital feels the whiplash sting of Government cutbacks.

Even for a woman who has spent the past four and a half years as health minister, residing on the denial and delusional ward of her department, passing every buck and offering empty bystander platitudes at every new disaster and misdiagnosis scandal she has presided over, that statement is quite shocking.

She is clearly insinuating – in a most cowardly way – that the crisis at Crumlin, the subsequent intensified suffering of its young patients and the threat to their treatment and recovery, has been deliberately triggered by the hospital staff. But, however Ms Harney attempts to twist and squirm her way out of responsibility, residents of the Real World rightly hold her to account for the chaos unfolding across the system.

Ms Harney has never been one to accept blame, learn from it and make changes. Indeed, her great reform, the HSE, was an expensive exercise in political disengagement, a labyrinthine bunker in which she could cower while claiming daily health service horror stories were nothing to do with her.

While no-one could dispute the break-up of the old health boards was a welcome move, the fact the expensive deadwood in those organisations was re-assembled flat-pack style and slotted into the HSE structure, so nobody lost their jobs, proves what a wasted opportunity it was.

Throw in €1.4m worth of bonuses for said bosses last year as they presided over numerous cancer misdiagnosis scandals and lurched from crisis to crisis, and the set up becomes ever more detached from reality where no age group is spared, as children bear the brunt of cutbacks and 76-year-old women are forced to wait in agony for two-and-a-half years or more for basic operations like hip replacements in a country the Government boasts is still one of the richest in Europe.

Now Ms Harney has gone further than her usual mantra of pretending it is all the HSE’s responsibility and snidely attacks the frontline clinicians trying to hold the whole thing together.

The charge that they are targeting the most sensitive areas for cuts is deeply offensive and presents them as ruthless manipulators ready to sacrifice the health and recovery of the most vulnerable in our society for the sake of a bit of political point-scoring.

Opposition disgust at her remarks appears genuine as they insist she must apologise or be removed.

The wreckage of recession washed up in Leinster House yesterday as Brian Cowen stumbled through the debris-strewn chamber floor. He lost his footing tripping over barriers his Government puts in the way of newly unemployed people getting help when they need it and fell flat on his face when confronted with the sickness of despair infecting Crumlin Children’s hospital.

The sad truth is the health service was a mess even in the boom, though Ms Harney would never accept any portion of the blame for that – or the fact that we are struggling through her fifth year of failure in a post clearly beyond her capabilities.