State of our health service: Harris should take advice from medic

WHEN former Taoiseach Brian Cowen was minister for health, he famously compared the post to Angola’s notorious war zone. After only four months in office, the present incumbent, Simon Harris, might be inclined to agree with him.

A perfect storm is brewing with demands for health services increasing right across the board. More than 500,000 people are on hospital waiting lists, a new record in the health service. The longest queue is at Galway University Hospital where over 11,300 people are waiting. The Health Service Executive is chronically short of both money and nurses, who are the backbone of the country’s hospitals but are now leaving the country in droves for jobs offering better pay and conditions and, crucially, less stress in hospitals ranging from the UK to Australia.

Rightly or wrongly, the executive is perceived in the popular mind as being top-heavy with layer upon layer of managers in a bewildering array of managerial structures. This is partly a hangover from the setting up of the HSE in 2005 when every job was guaranteed by the government of the day in an enormously costly consensus-ploy aimed at wresting power from a proliferation of health boards, all operating as independent fiefdoms, with the aim collecting them under one umbrella. The present head of the HSE, Tony O’Brien, has since compared the way the organisation was established over a decade ago to a “high-speed car crash”.