Our health service and lack of leadership is enough to make you sick

A FAIRLY routine medical procedure went wrong and I had to go to the Accident and Emergency at Tralee General Hospital last week. I immediately realised the agony that one would have to endure if there were no local hospital.

Having heard about patients having to wait for hours to be seen at other hospitals, I explained the situation to one of the doctors. He saw to it that I was treated immediately and thereafter I was “comfortable,” as they say in the communiqués. I spent the next four hours on a trolley, part of the time in the hallway. I could not write more highly about the kindness, or the professionalism of the hospital staff.

Everything was recorded on paper and there were voluminous files to be seen. Having worked on government files over the years, this was no surprise, but the difference is that few people ever get to see the health files. In the course of researching one book, I was given some health files by mistake on one occasion. When the archivist realised the mistake he asked me to sign that I would not divulge any of the material because it was highly confidential.

During the Kerry Babies Case in the early 1980s even the gardaí were not allowed access to files at the hospital without a court order. I shudder to think of the acres of valuable space that health files are taking up in this age of computers. Of course, when it comes to the Health Service Executive (HSE) and computers, we had the appalling extravagance of the fiasco over the Personnel, Payroll and Related Systems (PPARS).

This was the attempt to computerise payments to HSE staff. It was supposed to cost 9m, but — according to the Comptroller and Auditor General’s office — it cost between 180m and 220m before it was scrapped. Even then it had only been used to pay little over half of the people it was supposed to pay.

Hospital records should be computerised, as it would make them infinitely more retrievable and would save enormous storage space. Material on computers can be transferred instantaneously at minimum cost, which would also eliminate the extravagant absurdity of hiring taxies to deliver files from Tralee to Cork. But even that made more sense than having the HSE spend 2.35m on sending SIPTU gougers on 31 holiday junkets to places like New York, Hong Kong, and Australia. Those trips, which had nothing to do with health, were undertaken at the expense of health treatment and productive jobs.

One the current government’s parting shots was to announce that the payment of student nurses for their work would be phased out. Student nurses are currently paid 80% of the wages of nurses, but this government has decided to eliminate that payment over the coming four years. The student nurses are inevitably entrusted with the grubbiest of tasks. No doubt this gives them an insight into the less glamorous side of nursing. If they don’t do that work, somebody has to be paid to do it, so the government’s move is just another blistering indictment of their obscene indifference and their appalling lack of fairness.

We should probably be thankful that Fianna Fáil — in all its blinding indifference — has not tried to reintroduce slavery as a cost-saving measure. It is staggering that the government, which had failed so spectacularly to reform the gross extravagance within the health service, should now try to save money in such an unjust way.

While talking with some political correspondents at a Labour Party Conference in Killarney in 2003, Ruairí Quinn came up to me. We had never been introduced. “How can you write that shite about Charlie Haughey?” he asked.

I had not been uncritical of Haughey but felt that he did have some very real political accomplishments. Micheál Martin had been given Health as a kind of poisoned chalice to undermine him politically, like Brian Cowen and Michael Noonan before him, I replied. In the same way Jack Lynch appointed Haughey to Health in 1977, while people like George Colley, Martin O’Donoghue and Des O’Malley essentially controlled the purse strings of the cabinet. “They would not give Haughey the itch, but within little over two years he had done such an effective job as Minister for Health that he was elected Taoiseach,” I said.

“I’ll have to think about that,” said Quinn as he walked away. Of course, Haughey’s accomplishments did not excuse his misconduct, but neither should anybody be deluded into thinking that his misconduct excuses the mind-boggling incompetence of the whole gaggle of other Ministers for Health. Maybe they did not misbehave in their ministries, but they did little good and our society is now much the worse for their incompetence.

Micheál Martin presided over the amalgamation of the 11 Health Boards into the HSE. This was supposedly to reduce the number of managerial and administrative staff, but instead all the jobs were guaranteed and even more paper pushers were employed.

In any properly run company the person responsible for such a mess would be fired, but Fianna Fáil continues to promote such incompetence.

At the end of 2008 there were 17,967 administrative staff in the HSE, compared with 15,000 health and social-care professionals, according to Shane Ross and Nick Webb in their book, Wasters. When the HSE was set up there were six grade eight civil servants; now there are over 760.

Brian Cowen was out of his depth as Minister for Health. He described the portfolio as “Angola.” He was a disaster as Minister for Finance and was as bad as Taoiseach. He leaves office with the lowest favourable rating in history.

In recent years we have witnessed the deplorable performance of some public servants who have buggered this country. Instead of being fired they were pensioned off with spectacular bonuses. The Taoiseach will leave with a golden handshake of 150,000 and a pension of 150,000, as well as a free car and driver for the rest of his life. In a republic all citizens are supposed to be equal. He is only 51, but most other people have to work until they are 66 to get a pension, and it will only be a fraction of what he is getting. What kind of lousy example is this?

Fianna Fáil has been claiming credit for the current performance of Irish exports, but the only credit they deserve is for not having screwed up our exports, like they destroyed so many other aspects of our economy. They inherited a strong, growing economy in 1997. The person who deserves most credit for that was Ruairí Quinn, who — as Minister for Finance in the Rainbow Government — was the architect of attracting so much foreign industry to this country with the drastic cut in corporation tax.

It is time to demand real leadership from our politicians with firm commitments to end the plunder. On becoming President of the USA at the height of the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt sought to implement his New Deal programme within 100 days.

The parties should now specify what they would do to tackle the political graft within three months of gaining power. Let’s insist on fairness and leadership by proper example — for a change.