No light at the end of the tunnel for patients left on waiting lists

ON October 6, 2015, then health minister Leo Varadkar told the Oireachtas Committee on Health that hospital waiting lists were unacceptable. Commenting on the lengthy waiting times for public patients, he said €51m in additional funding would be made available.

Back then Mr Varadkar was rightly concerned about the hardship and suffering, let alone the physical and psychological toll, delays cause to those in pain.

He is a doctor, after all. But back then the number of people waiting for surgery was 63,000.

So five years on we can reasonably expect things would be much better, given the level of commitment and the billions pumped into the system since.

Well, they’re not. They are worse.

Today, 81,000 patients are waiting and the best the Department of Health can hope for is to cut the number to 70,000 at the end of the year. Even if this extremely modest goal were to be met, it would still be thousands more than when Mr Varadkar was minister; now he is Taoiseach and his responsibility is even greater.

The HSE is failing, and the Government seems comfortable to preside over a hands-off approach.

Minister Simon Harris has also watched a deterioration in services. The Government is not managing this crisis and it is the old and sick who are paying.

The statistics are just numbers and they cannot reflect the anguish and anxiety of someone awaiting a procedure.

This week nurses claimed hospital overcrowding was out of control. There were 600 patients waiting on trolleys or on wards for admission to a hospital bed.

A&E conditions have never been worse; being forced to lie on a trolley under fluorescent lights with no privacy or comfort is not acceptable.

THE Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) general secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said the new trolley figures confirmed that hospitals simply can’t cope. “The system is unable to manage patient flow and the burden is falling on nursing and medical staff who are forced to work in intolerable conditions,” she said.

If hospitals are unable to handle the volume of patients right now, the facts speak for themselves: we are heading towards a catastrophe with an expanding population and a rise in the number of older people.

As already said, billions have been poured in by the State and the average private health insurance holder paid €1,150 last year, and yet we are going backwards.

The doctors and nurses are at the end of their tether. Addressing the IMO conference in Killarney on Saturday Mr Harris said: “We must make real changes to healthcare delivery in order to have a sustainable healthcare system in the future. Put simply, we have no option but to reform.” But what does that mean? Talk is cheap.

As Dr Peadar Gilligan pointed out, reform should be change with a view to improvement: “What we have in the health service is often change without evidence of improvement. I am sick of doing more with less.”

Just like Thomas Edison, Leo Varadkar and Simon Harris are refusing to accept their failures. The inventor famously insisted: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Messrs Varadkar and Harris seem intent on finding 10,000 more as far as the HSE is concerned; the difference is we are still awaiting a light bulb moment.