Irish Examiner view: Time to heed the warnings

Climate change isn't the only subject where persistent warnings have been dismissed or ignored. It should not come as a surprise to be alerted again this week to the persistent failings in our health service

Cork University Hospital, which has experienced high levels of overcrowding this week. File picture: Dan Linehan

Pandemics cast a searchlight over society and reveal its failings and shortcomings. They highlight all that is strong in our communities and should spur us on to tackle the challenges that are now impossible to ignore.

On Monday, with the publication of a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we saw, in the starkest terms, what happens when we disregard repeated warnings. Human activity is now changing the earth’s climate in unprecedented ways and if we don’t cut greenhouse gases rapidly and drastically in the next decade, we face climate breakdown.

The report was a “code red for humanity”, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said. Inger Andersen, the UN’s environment programme director, got to the heart of the problem when she said we had been warned about the dangers for decades, but did not listen. Or rather, the world listened but neither heard nor acted strongly enough. “As a result,” Ms Andersen said, “climate change is a problem that is here, now. Nobody is safe. And it is getting worse faster.”

Climate change isn't the only subject where persistent warnings have been dismissed or ignored. It should not come as a surprise, then, to be alerted again this week to the persistent failings in our health service. The Healthcare Overview Report 2020 outlined how hospitals were hampered in managing Covid-19 by long waiting lists, overcrowding, and staff shortages, as well as ageing buildings.

Why did we need the Health Information and Quality Authority report to remind us of the need to address the structural failures in our health system? The pandemic had already laid them cruelly bare and heightened the need for action.

There were similar urgent warnings on the need for healthcare reform after the Spanish flu epidemic of a century ago. Any attempts at reform, however, were shelved and forgotten as the country was plunged into civil war.

If that tells us anything, it is that ignored warnings do not make the issue go away. Instead, the situation gets worse, as the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation made clear this week when it warned of the urgent need to tackle the worst overcrowding in hospitals since the pandemic began.

The Irish Medical Organisation, too, has spoken of doctors who are looking ahead to the winter with “a sense of despair and foreboding”. It estimates that the HSE urgently needs 2,000 medical specialists across acute hospital and psychiatry services. An estimated 1,660 additional GPs are also needed.

The reasons for those concerns are the “deep fundamental deficiencies in our health system”, as Irish Hospital Consultants Association vice-president Professor Rob Landers described it; deficiencies that have been exposed by the pandemic and, more recently, by the cyberattack.

And these are just the warnings that have come in recent days. There have been many others signalling the urgent need to address longstanding issues within the health service. The Government must not only listen but hear and take action.