Irish Examiner View: Health service crisis really is a matter of life and death

Patients on trolleys trollies at CUH Cork University Hospital. File Picture.

Unless specific and concrete measures are taken to deal with ongoing problems with the HSE we will be facing years, if not decades, of a declining and demoralised health service.

As the Oireachtas health committee heard yesterday, the ongoing crises being faced almost every day in our hospitals are the direct results of failures by successive governments to properly resource the health service.

The committee heard from representatives of those working in healthcare that we are returning to pre-pandemic overcrowding levels.

The Irish Medical Organisation has described hospital overcrowding as a grave danger to patients. IMO assistant director of policy and international affairs Vanessa Hetherington told the committee that persistent overcrowding in hospitals, like record hospital waiting lists, are the direct results of an equally persistent failure to invest in bed capacity, infrastructure, and medical workforce to meet the needs of a growing and ageing population.

Given that we are about to offer residence to 100,000 people fleeing Ukraine, the challenges for the health service are likely to become even greater.

The problem, however, is not just a shortage of beds. There is no point in adding beds unless it is accompanied by hiring more medical and other staff to handle them.

Our political leaders have to take responsibility for the decline in our health service and the fact that it is consistently in crisis mode.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin was health minister from 2000 to 2004, while Tánaiste Leo Varadkar served in the same capacity from 2014 to 2016. They should be more aware than most politicians of the problems within the service.

The Government’s decision on Tuesday to allow non-EEA doctors who have been working here for two years to access permits and spousal rights without preconditions is a welcome start to addressing the shortage of doctors, but we also need to make working here more attractive for nurses.

We don’t have enough nurses or hospital doctors and there are certain specialist areas within the health service that are suffering these shortages most acutely. 

In a report last week, the Neurological Alliance of Ireland (NAI), revealed that there is a serious shortage of neurology nurses in Dublin. Dublin hospitals only have 28 nurses working in the neurology sector — a shortfall of 57 nurse specialists caring for people in Dublin and surrounding counties.

But, of course, the shortage is nationwide. According to NAI executive director Magdalen Rogers, there are 800,000 people living in Ireland with a neurological condition.

We know that 24,000 people are waiting for a neurology outpatient appointment, with 8,601 waiting more than 18 months resulting in delayed diagnosis and treatment,” she said. 

"Neurology patients deserve better."

So do all patients. More than 21,000 patients have been on hospital trolleys waiting for a bed so far this year and the situation is getting worse, not better.

That makes it, literally, a matter of life and death.