White paper is no cure for health system ills

I sat down to read Health Minister James Reilly’s opus on universal health insurance, to see if thought had been put into improving healthcare delivery.

The white paper has great detail on treatments and new administrative structures to manage them.

But it does not discuss how delivery of frontline healthcare can be fixed, nor the systematic changes that would improve patient safety. Lessons are not being learned in the context of the management culture and processes within the health service.