Health delays - Reform is taking far, far too long

IF TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern did not have the Mahon Tribunal to distract public attention from the litany of scandals that pass for management in our health services he would have to invent something equally distracting.

However, he might prefer something less intrusive or persistent. Something less interested in sterling and the great plethora of bank accounts needed to run a constituency office, buy houses for distressed aunts with someone else’s money, or accounts opened “with a view to getting a mortgage at a later date.”

Today we report on the lack of services and long delays facing the one-in-six people who suffer from arthritis. Previously unpublished Health Service Executive data shows that patients are waiting up to four years — yes, that’s right, four years — to be seen by a rheumatologist in Sligo, Leitrim, Donegal, Cork or South Dublin. Even worse, if your situation is urgent, and you are unlucky enough to live in Galway or South Dublin you will have to wait for 18 months.

It is easy to understand, but not accept, these delays when you realise that we employ just one fifth of the recommended number of rheumatologists.

In Ireland, where our economy is, or more accurately was, “the envy of the rest Europe” and one of our Taoiseach’s “great achievements”, there is only one full-time rheumatologist for every 400,000 people.

The World Health Organisation recommends one for every 80,000. So, we have 20% of what we need to get the job done; a great achievement indeed.

These figures, taken in isolation, represent abject failure. When taken in conjunction with the mismanagement in other areas, they represent something approaching a national emergency.

Nor can these figures be dismissed as a surprise as a report published by Comhairle na nOspidéal in 2005 called for the appointment of 14 consultants. At that time an Oireachtas committee was warned that some patients had become suicidal.

The situation in neurology is just as bad. Just last week Dr Norman Delanty, director of the national epilepsy programme, said he will no longer be able to see patients referred by family doctors. Warning that access to epilepsy and other neurological care is “horrendous,” he said he would have to confine referrals to hospital specialists, a move that will exacerbate the two-year — just two years, thank God for that — wait.

No doubt the HSE chief Professor Brendan Drumm and Health Minister Mary Harney and their staff are determined to resolve these issues, but it is the perception that there is no sense of urgency — emergency really — that leaves them open to such strident criticism.

We have just had two bank holiday weekends and if a business was in equally dire straits it would have been all hands on deck — the bank holiday could come later.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could believe that some group somewhere in the HSE worked over the holidays to try to sort out the mess. Sadly, and how wonderfully uplifting it would be to be wrong, it is likely the same old ineffectual faces are puttering along at the same old mañana pace, and that things are changing at a pace even slower than the truth is emerging in Dublin Castle.