Surgeon’s exasperation - Indifference must be stamped out

ONE should never underestimate the ability of bureaucrats to foul up, and the health service has been providing a stream of appalling examples in recent years.

Thus one may be surprised that anyone could any longer be shocked by disclosures about our healthcare system, but the events described at Cork University Hospital should exhaust our vocabulary of outrage.

The complaints were not from tortured patients or distraught members of their families, but from a consultant plastic surgeon working at the hospital. In obvious exasperation he wrote to the hospital’s general manager and copied 30 of the hospital staff highlighting events on just one shift during which a critically ill woman who had suffered a serious chest injury that required a breast removal was left on an A&E trolley for the night without morphine.