The health service is profoundly broken

WHEN paramedic Willie Bermingham drove his seven-year-old daughter, Ruby, to Crumlin Children’s Hospital, she was suffering excruciating pain. She waited from the early hours of the morning until eight at night to be treated, and there wasn’t even a trolley available for her. Instead, she lay stretched out on a couch in the hospital’s bereavement suite, where families normally gather after the tragic death of a child.

Mr Bermingham described seeing other children, some in agony, sleeping in corridors and on chairs.

Later, Ruby was one of five children who needed emergency surgery for a burst appendix, and she is now recovering well.

Working with Dublin Fire Brigade, Mr Bermingham says he is used to seeing Third World conditions in hospitals, but he was clearly shocked that even children are now feeling the effects of the trolley crisis. Ironically, while Ruby was in hospital, Health Minister Simon Harris was on RTÉ’s Prime Time defending his record and outlining plans to alleviate the problem.

His Government has been in power for seven years now, and in that time the situation has got worse, with no solution in sight.

Even if he can’t be blamed for the lethargy of his predecessors, Mr Harris has been two years in the job and his performance is just not good enough.

It took a year to write a report on how many extra hospital beds we need when, by right, it should hardly have taken a week; the trolley figures from around the country tell their own tale.

He says we will see improvements from the end of this year, but that simply is not sufficient to assuage public outrage.

He said he thinks about this issue 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is good – but if he were the boss of a private company, and one of its divisions was in chaos, he actually would be on site 24/7 until the problem was fixed.

No doubt the doctors and nurses who hold the entire creaking edifice together with sheer dedication and sweat would also love the chance to tell him what they need to make the system work.

Mr Harris was correct to cancel his foreign trip on St Patrick’s Day, but he needs to spend the time not thinking about the problem, but actually on the frontline, with the staff who also work 24/7, fixing what, for the moment, is profoundly broken.