It’s shameful a sick child has to take to the airwaves to get help
TIS THE season to be ghoulish. And in the spirit of Halloween, Ireland’s pandemic experience can now be diagnosed as undead.
The country must endure more weeks yet of this zombie state.
This is not because of a deadly new variant of coronavirus, but an old Irish failing.
The virus has not changed, but neither have the fundamentals of the Irish health service.
Just as it was in March 2020, the need to protect a dysfunctional system that consumes vast amounts of money to limited effect, is paramount.
This week’s Budget included a total package for health spending in excess of €22billion in 2022, yet there is no expectation that this staggering level of investment will result in improved services.
The struggle will, instead, go on, and it is the patients, their families and frontline workers who will continue to bear the greatest burden of such a system.
Healthcare sources were, in recent days, busily briefing about the imminent threat to the system if cases of Covid-19 continue to rise and inevitably start spilling into hospitals.
That this remains the fear that is overwhelmingly shaping the policy response to the pandemic is unsurprising, but no less dismaying for that.
It is also a reminder that there will be no blank slate to address pervasive failings in healthcare in the aftermath of this crisis.
There will be no reset for Irish healthcare, no drastic change in how business is done.
Perhaps this feels especially frustrating given the tremendous success of the vaccine rollout. It showed that the machinery of State can operate quickly, flexibly and efficiently for the public good, and it was a tribute to the skill and hard work of thousands.
Yet old failings merely laid dormant over the past year and a half, and they have emerged, like a hand from the grave in a Halloween horror movie, grasping after us, as we thought the danger was over.
Anger has understandably been directed towards the hundreds of thousands of adults who refused vaccines amid renewed concerns about Covid-19, but the fundamental problem is the structural weakness of the health service.
An interview given by a ten-yearold Cork boy waiting more than four years for scoliosis surgery shamed leading politicians into a response, with the Taoiseach pledging Government support for Adam Terry. The child’s eloquence and suffering were both palpable in the radio interview, and it is perverse that a patient has to appear on the national broadcaster to plead for treatment, and receive a positive response. Not every one of the more than 900,000 people on waiting lists can be interviewed on RTÉ or have their circumstances brought to the attention of Micheál Martin, and it was instructive that one of the headline announcements in the health budget was €250million for a plan to reduce waiting times.
MEASURES like this are desperately needed, but they are also a regular feature of healthcare policy in this country, a rolling drama of task forces, supplementary budgets and emergency measures, the administrative equivalent of running to standstill.
There has been a familiar look to the choreography of the past 48 hours, as experts who had slipped out of focus in recent months returned to prominence, expressing their concerns as the ground was prepared for a slowdown in final reopening plans.
It would be thoroughly irresponsible of the Government to persevere with those plans if the risk of a significant spike in hospital admissions is rising, but this return to darker, cautious times is nonetheless desperately frustrating.
Anti-vaxxers and refuseniks are not solely responsible.
Old failings, long resistant to change, haunt us again.