We really can’t have it both ways - Waiting times in health service

BY any criteria, by any standard of decency, today’s report that more than 20,000 children are waiting for a hospital appointment, that some children have to wait more than two years for an MRI scan and that 250 children have waited up to two years for life-recovering orthopaedic surgery is another terrible, shaming indictment of this society.

It also shows our chest-out harrumphing about “treating all of the children of the Nation equally” for the dishonest, offensive lip-service it really is. That those children made to wait so very long for basic health services are condemned do so only because they do not enjoy the comfort blanket provided by private health insurance deepens the injustice. It once again underlines the sense of failure and chaos that have dogged our health services for far, far, too long.

This sense of slapdash, on-the-hoof policy making is underlined in another area of children’s health provision. Before the last election Taoiseach Enda Kenny gave a commitment to open the by-now mythical National Children’s Hospital in the lifetime of the outgoing Government. That, of course, did not happen but the pldege is inevitably recycled in the current manifesto — on page 65, it’s covered in a short sentence and unencumbered by a commitment to an opening date though a “revised” date of 2020 has been mentioned elsewhere. Don’t count your hospital beds before the ward is opened though, just last week a decision on the current proposed site, beside Dublin city centre’s St James’s Hospital, was deferred until May because of planning “complexities”.