The notion of fairness is alien to private hospitals

THE Beacon Hospital’s seeming to play pass the parcel at a rich kids’ party with our precious stash of Covid vaccines while cancer patients waited in limbo for their lifesaving jab is a parable of our times. The outrage that greeted the story reflected a public whose patience was snapping at incontrovertible evidence of how, when our most invaluable publicly owned commodity was on the table, the so-called golden circle managed to carve it up for themselves.

Anyone who believed HSE rhetoric – about how delivery would be based on need only – felt like a mug while those in high-risk cohorts were betrayed by the idea of teachers in a less risky cohort having the AstraZeneca vaccine coursing through their veins.

But fury and disgust aside, the saga is also a cautionary tale about the perils of allowing private hospitals plug the yawning gap in the nation’s health service.

Private hospitals did nicely out of the first lockdown, trousering €305m in return for keeping beds free for the avalanche of Covid patients that the State feared would cause the creaking hospital system to collapse.

The surge never materialised, thankfully, but the HSE paid handsomely for the capacity guarantee.

Now that the urgency surrounds vaccination, the Beacon’s resources have again been marshalled to provide a hub for vaccinating frontline healthcare workers.

BUT while this was provided at no financial cost – there’s sadly now an entirely different price to pay, in terms of public confidence in the rollout, in its fairness and transparency. Advocates of private medicine say that the private and the public health services should operate in tandem, with the former private easing the pressure on the public by taking on surgical procedures that clog up public waiting lists.

But the difference between the Beacon and, for example, Beaumont Hospital is not just that the former has state-of-the-art facilities and fancy coffee docks while the latter has little of either. It’s that they are powered by a vastly different ethos.

The Beacon is a business and

while it provides top-notch care to patients who can pay either with their private funds or through health insurance, it exists to make a profit for its investors.

Beaumont is run by the HSE and, for better or worse, it is run along public service values by a staff whose core motivation is to do good in a socially useful way and where rich and poor are treated the same. It goes without saying that it never ever turns a profit.

Apart from perhaps sharing the same pool of well-heeled consultants, private and public hospitals are worlds apart. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that in one a hinterland of money and privilege is taken for granted, whereas in the other it’s the exception rather than the rule.

HINDSIGHT is perfect vision but the HSE should have given detailed instructions to the Beacon when it entrusted it to take on the enormous public service responsibility of disseminating our limited supply of vaccines.

For when in doubt, the default position of a private hospital will not be the same as a public outfit. Private hospitals are a microcosm of the elite, their culture is entirely divorced from wider society or values of fairness.

The best thing that can be said for the Beacon’s decision to vaccinate one of the swankiest schools in the country is that modestly paid teachers were the beneficiaries, not the parents’ association or, heaven forfend, the braying past pupils’ union.

Nor did the management call on their cronies in the yacht club or the rugby club to pitch up at the Beacon for the leftover jab. By selecting teachers they showed a modicum of public awareness, perhaps as much as they are capable of. The Beacon has rightly apologised but perhaps the real culprits in this sorry saga are the policy makers who presided over decades-long neglect of the country’s health service so that the privatisation of healthcare became a foregone conclusion.