HSE chief deals fatal blow to the politics of hospital bed numbers

LAST week I wrote here about how it has become a given that we need to recruit 2,000 more gardaí.

What should be a more complex debate about how we tackle crime and improve policing has been reduced to a head count about Garda numbers.

In a similar way, the debate about the state of our health services, and our hospital service in particular, has also been reduced to simplistic criteria - in this instance to a bed count, rather than a head count. It has (until very recently) been an almost unquestioned political fact that we do not have enough acute hospital beds and that we need 3,000 new ones. Creating the infrastructure, equipment and personnel to service 3,000 new hospital places has become a key focus of Government health policy for the last number of years. At the same time Opposition attacks on the Government’s health performance have been focused on whether or not these additional beds have been delivered.