Government must act on health crisis

THE report into the tragic death of two-year-old Róisín Ruddle, whose heart surgery was postponed, is yet another damning indictment of Ireland’s shambles of a health service.

The country’s leading children’s hospital has come in for scathing criticism, and rightly so, for its inaction in recruiting intensive care nurses.

To its shame, the Department of Health was aware of nursing manpower problems in the area since the mid-1990s but yet the problems persisted.