Eventual reform of the health service must be our lasting tribute to frontline saviours
THOSE of us lucky enough to have jobs, a decent place to live and good health may be tempted to fall into a state of complacency about the pandemic.
But the devastating details in todays paper of the state of our health service as it buckles under the weight of an unpredictable and far-reaching crisis shows the falsity of such a conviction.
Despite the good news of falling Covid-19 case numbers, there is still a mountain to climb, while the possibility of the health service and its management being stretched to breaking point has not gone away.
Our ICUs are full while our nursing homes exist in a state of perilous uncertainty, poised between the prospect of an outbreak of the deadly virus on the one hand or battling one that has already taken grip of vulnerable residents and their carers on the other.
In the community, alarming numbers of carers cannot work due to Covid, leaving agencies shortstaffed when it comes to caring for the elderly at home.
The terrifying prospect of the elderly and the sick left unattended whether at home, in hospital or in nursing homes because of staff shortages is unprecedented, highlighting our debt to frontline workers.
In our individual working lives, we all play our part in the national effort but no one is more intrinsic to the defeat of the virus, returning the country to good health and its creaking health service to some form of normality than health workers.
Today, we outline the stark realities which many of these workers confront daily in our over-burdened ICUs and nursing homes. The words of one carer: ‘Everybody is wearing PPE and we’re still at massive risk. Everybody is overworked, everybody is exhausted, everybody is extremely stressed. Everybody’s nerves are raw,’ bring home in a visceral way the magnitude of the trauma that the country now endures.
The self-sacrifice and work ethic expected of, and delivered by, our health workers throws into focus the failure of Government and unions to reach a deal to open schools for children with additional needs.
It is hard to understand why the discourse about returning to the classroom to undertake the essential work of teaching vulnerable children is not coloured by the fierce commitment of health workers, let alone the sense of duty displayed by student nurses who risk their health throughout their training.
The main way we can play our part in this troubled time is by following the restrictions. Ultimately, we will defeat the virus and reclaim the lives we love with many lessons learned.
Chief among them should be public insistence on health service reform so that when, and if, another crisis presents itself, our health service doesn’t flounder or depend on emergency measures such as a ‘your-country-needs-you’ recruitment drive for doctors and nurses, or on counting overflow beds.
We owe it to ourselves, to HSE frontline workers and to those who have lost their lives to this virus to never again allow our health service to fall into such a state of disrepair.
Let a streamlined and wellmanaged health service, free of vested interests, underpinned by efficient policies, be a tribute to the decency of its workforce and a lasting memorial to those who have died.