HSE resources - Idle scanner a waste of vital funds

For the past three weeks, the Health Service Executive (HSE) has been spending about €6,000 a week sending public patients from Mallow General Hospital (MGH) to the Bon Secours private hospital in Cork for CT scans, while a scanner lies idle at MGH.

Following its purchase at a cost of €1.5 million, the scanner was idle for over a year. It was finally due to be commissioned in July 2008, but this had to be deferred because the specialist radiographer who was offered the position declined to take it up.

A second radiographer was then offered the position, but he declined it also, and a locum specialist took up duties last September until recently. Management at MGH have since made every possible effort to secure a locum to continue the service, according to the HSE.

Questions must be asked as to why it has been so difficult to fill the specialist position. Fears are being expressed that the difficulty in attracting a specialist with the necessary qualifications may have something to do with the HSE’s tendency to concentrate services in the large cities.

Specialists are therefore more inclined to take up the positions on offer in those larger urban centres, rather than risk the possibility of being uprooted from a smaller centre like Mallow.

Without the specialist expertise to run the CT scanner, it has been necessary to send patients who are deemed “clinically urgent”, to Cork for private treatment. This involves not only the €600 cost for each patient’s scan but also the use of ambulances for transportation. Those could be needed for emergencies during the protracted period that they are travelling to and from Cork city.

Of course, this is about more than money. Compelling patients, sometimes critically ill, to undertake the journey from Mallow to Cork is cruel, especially when the necessary technology is already available at MGH.

Bernard Allen, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Oireachtas, has decried the whole thing as “another example of services being wasted”. He tabled a question in the Dáil last week asking why taxpapers’ money is being used in this way.

Will he get a reply before the Dáil adjourns for its protracted summer vacation next week? Deputy Allen says he will ask officials of the HSE when they come before the PAC in the autumn.