HSE strategy putting lives at risk

OVER the past five years, the Health Service Executive has waged an unrelenting campaign to downgrade and ultimately destroy rural hospitals throughout Ireland.

Dundalk, Monaghan, Ennis and Roscommon have all fallen victim to this HSE crusade. The unpalatable fact is that in 1980 this nation had a population of 3 million with 18,000 acute hospital beds.

Today we have 11,300 to serve 4.5 million citizens. However, the number of administrators, operating in a culture of unparalleled incompetence and unaccountability, has almost trebled since 1997. Our health service now has more than 17,000 full-time bureaucrats protected by “jobs for life” regardless of performance.

The results of this can be heard in the screams of pain from trolleys across Ireland, as our elderly citizens suffer the indignity of being forced to share a portable commode with violently intoxicated drug addicts.

When challenged as to the wisdom of their tactics, the HSE invariably claims they are acting in the best interests of “patient safety”. Thus, opponents of local hospital downgrading are often portrayed as ignoramuses and a potential threat to good medical care. This cowardly and false analysis is eagerly lapped up by the media, which appears to regard regurgitating HSE press releases as an outstanding contribution to national discourse.

The reality is that the vast majority of sick people requiring inpatient care are not victims of complex trauma, nor do they need expert specialist care. They typically have illnesses that can easily be treated as inpatients in well-resourced, small local hospitals, many of which have successfully been providing this service for decades. Indeed, I would argue that these patients receive a higher standard of care in such locations than they ever will on a filthy corridor in a supposed “centre of excellence”.

The HSE is now turning their 17,000 clipboards in the direction of a wonderful medical facility known as Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan. Its agenda is clear — to force the sick and vulnerable of Co Meath onto trolleys in one of the worst and most overcrowded hospitals in Ireland, Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda. This strategy has been reassuringly christened the “transformation” plan, in a pathetic attempt to portray it in a positive light.

As a doctor working in the North East region, I wish to make my opinion clear. If the HSE is allowed to close or downgrade Navan A&E, I believe patients will die tragic, painful and unnecessary deaths due to a sheer lack of alternative bed capacity. The Minister for Health has recently given Our Lady’s Hospital a six-month “stay of execution”. I plead with him to publicly renounce the HSE’s potentially lethal “transformation” strategy and to save the lives of those whose voices may never otherwise be heard.

Dr Ruairi Hanley

Kells

Co Meath