Policy values accountancy over people

The dire warning from the master of the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street is chillingly stark: overstretched services means cutting corners, which puts safety at issue and compromises patient care.

Recently, we have had graphic illustrations of what Dr Declan Keane means in the broader sense, from the death of premature baby Bronagh Livingstone last December to last week's appalling death of Róisín Ruddle whose crucial heart surgery was cancelled.

What is central to those tragic deaths, is a government policy which rates book-keeping to be more important than the health and safety of people.

Unfortunately, the situation at Holles Street is symptomatic of the chronic lack of services in hospitals all over the country, whether in maternity hospitals or general ones.

The difference from one to the other is only a matter of degrees.

Despite the fact that €9 billion is being poured into the national health service, it represents extraordinarily bad value for money for those who have need of it.

Even at this stage, the long-term fundamental review of the service announced recently by Health Minister Micheál Martin, based on the Brennan and Prospectus reports, does not evince any great confidence that the public's expectation of what such an expensive system should provide will be delivered.

Quite simply, the country cannot afford to wait, for the good of its health, for whatever benefits the minister hopes, and intends, may accrue eventually from the new strategy.

In the meantime, public concern is palpably rising at the totally unacceptable policy which witnesses the tragically preventable death of a baby because of the lack of finance, in the most recent case, less than 1,000.

Yet, because of an overbearing, almost paranoid, obsession with accountancy, it is not unlikely that other families will be tormented by trauma because of the fatal shortcomings being pursued blindly by the Government.

The master of the National Maternity Hospital is bluntly telling the Government that pregnant women and babies are being put at risk because services there are overstretched.

An outdated hospital, is expected to deal with a projected birth rate this year of 8,644 babies, up almost six percent on last year, without the proper resources.

Compounding the problem in the hospital, is another example of the Government's ambivalence about a situation that needs to be resolved but which they would rather not confront.

Despite the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled, in relation to asylum seekers, that while all children born here are automatically entitled to citizenship, their parents are not, there is still an influx of heavily pregnant asylum seekers.

It is not a problem which the hospital should be expected to deal with, but it is one which it, and other hospitals, have imposed on them because of the Government's equivocation.

It is utterly ludicrous that while the hospital has limited the numbers of women attending from Meath, Kildare and Wicklow for routine obstetric care, the rate of deliveries is seriously increasing, with patients being put at risk because of factors outside its control.