Susie Long’s legacy is a damning indictment of our lack of care
There were pictures earlier this week of her dignified children Áine and Fergus and husband Conor as they laid her to rest. Tributes were paid to the courage she demonstrated in devoting so much of the limited time she had left to highlighting the crisis in our health services, hoping her personal tragedy could turn into a force for positive change.
At her funeral, her husband read a passage entitled “Not, how did she die, but how did she live?”
Of course the family want to remember her life, but the first question contained in that passage — how did she die? — is also one that warrants close attention.
Susie Long’s story is important not just because of the scandal of her untimely and unnecessary death, but because of the simplicity and clarity of her situation and what it tells us about Ireland in the 21st century.
Her bravery has encouraged others to write of their own experiences — some of which have happier endings and different contexts — but they all share one thing: a sense that the victims are invisible.
On Tuesday morning on Pat Kenny’s RTÉ radio show, a long email was read out containing yet another disturbing account of our rotten health system. It was written by a mother who could not sleep due to her distress and found herself at the computer at six o’clock in the morning writing in a dignified, yet angry, tone.
She recounted the experiences of her 17-year-old son who fell ill and, from the time of his first admission, had to wait 37 hours in A&E at the Mater Hospital in Dublin.
A few of those hours were spent at home, but most of them were endured on a hard chair in A&E before he was seen to, despite the fact he could not even swallow his own saliva and was chronically dehydrated.
Thankfully, he is now recovered, but his mother also mentioned that, having already buried her 21-year-old daughter, she was seriously considering leaving the country because she remains terrified at the prospect of remaining in Ireland in case any of her other family members fall ill. The most galling aspect of her experience was the fact that the bill from the Mater Hospital arrived in a shorter space of time than her son had been waiting in A&E.
Listening to these stories, it is difficult to believe they are accounts of Ireland in the 21st century.
Susie Long’s original email contained many of the elements of the health system that have been highlighted in the past few years — the waiting lists, the agony suffered at home, wonderful and friendly health staff fronting a chaotic and shambolic system, the stoic and dignified cancer patients, hospital units being threatened with closure even after money has been spent to improve them, and the terror of contracting MRSA.
In her original email, Susie Long wrote: “Once when I used the toilet, my pyjama bottoms soaked up urine up to my ankles. Even though I was sick and weak, I still tried to hover over the toilet so I wouldn’t have to touch it. I wasn’t able to hover and hold up my pyjama legs at the same time.” She also explained the anger and frustration she felt on hearing that an individual with the same condition was going to live because he had private health insurance and she knew she was going to die because she did not.
She criticised politicians in charge of healthcare because “all they can think to do is put resources into privatisation”, supported by an electorate who do not seem to want to confront the reality of what that means.
The initial response of Health Minister Mary Harney to Susie Long’s death was one that has been heard before in reaction to the other needless deaths that have occurred as a result of the failure of the politics of healthcare in this country.
The situation, she said, was “unacceptable to me”. It was a meaningless response. She seems to be suggesting that she is outside of all this. It reminded me of the attitude to poverty that existed in the 1920s in the new Free State when Cumann na nGael minister Patrick McGilligan asserted, “people may have to die in this country, and die of starvation”.
The early 21st century equivalent seems to be “people may have to die in this country, and die because of the two-tier health system”.
The statement Ms Harney made on Tuesday night about the introduction of a common waiting list for private and public patients as part of the new consultants’ contract is a pious gesture and regarded by many working in the health system as a smokescreen to hide the fundamental structural weaknesses of the public system.
Ms Harney is the same minister who asserted in the Dáil in July: “As for trolleys, some people spend all their time, perhaps 24 hours, being observed on a trolley. Recently, a close friend of mine who would be known to many members had such an experience in a Dublin hospital. He told me it was a very pleasant experience. There will always be people on trolleys and many people are treated on them. The issue is the length of time someone must wait to be dealt with in an accident and emergency department.”
When Fine Gael TD Charles Flanagan put it to her that she should not suggest the general experience of being on a trolley was pleasant, Ms Harney replied: “It is for many people”.
YES, there will “always be people on trolleys”, and while deaths as a result of the two-tier system she promotes are “unacceptable” to her on a personal level, she is not going to do anything to stop this madness because ultimately, according to her misguided ideology, healthcare is a marketable commodity and state funds will continue to be used to subsidise and promote private care while not enough is being done to improve access to primary care for those who cannot afford it.
When researching her book Unhealthy State five years ago, Maev Ann Wren observed: “There is a perception that the Irish healthcare system is so complex that remedying its problems is too daunting a task. In my research it became apparent that the complexity is superficial, the flaws are fundamentally simple and the remedies quite achievable.”
There is no more fundamentally simple flaw than the two-tier approach to healthcare access that resulted in Susie Long’s unnecessary death at the age of 41.
It would be gratifying if there could be a return to the acceptance of the principle enunciated so clearly by Aneurin Bevan who, as health minister in Britain 60 years ago, established the National Health Service there with the support of his Labour colleagues: “No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means”.
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