A chilling diagnosis of the Irish health service
DR SAM Coulter Smith, consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology, and master of the Rotunda Hospital since 2009, a position he will relinquish this year, says his tenure coincided with a perfect storm for medicine — recession, salary cuts, failure to invest, and rising numbers of births.
“We have probably had the biggest recession in living memory and that has affected the health budget, with a serious reduction in spending, he says. “We have had substantial salary cuts, inability to invest in infrastructure over the years. We have had moratoriums on head counts. It has been the perfect storm, and it has happened at a time when demand for maternity services was going up and we were getting a steady increase in activity levels right up to 2012.”
