Shameful service in need of overhaul
WE DON’T need the OECD to tell us our health service is in a poor state.
We already have to live with the daily, shameful reports of children forced to wait up to three years to see an orthopaedic surgeon while 90-year-olds are shuttled around on hospital trolleys for days.
But the humiliation of being the target of such international reproach at a time of economic recovery may be what is needed to at last shake up the Government and health officials to tackle the drift.
The health service budget for 2018 is at €15.3bn, an alltime high.
But 693,890 public patients are on some form of waiting list. There are 502,482 in a queue to see a specialist. We shuddered in April 2015 when it passed a landmark 400,000, unaware of the nightmare figures to come.
In 2015, there were 2,244 waiting more than 18 months for surgery, but this has now climbed to 4,948.
The graph is depressingly upwards for a range of other waiting lists across mental health and therapies.
Now, the trolley crisis has reached a new level where many days the numbers waiting for a bed are in excess of 600.
Bear in mind it was declared
a “national emergency” under former health minister Mary Harney when the trolley count reached 495.
The usual excuses are delivered to defend this backward slide – the austerity years, the ageing population and the way our health service is too reliant on hospitals at the expense of community services.
These are usually followed by endless promises of reorganisation. The Sláintecare report is the new utopia, replacing the ditched universal health insurance Dutch model.
This week has been particularly telling because it has exposed the poor levels of resilience in hospitals which have been so slow to recover from the adverse weather shutdown.
It points to failures in management.
But it also highlights once again the lack of accountability from the Government down, which continues to be at the heart of our health service malaise.