Ground hurling from Watt is to be welcomed - if it works
SURE, when it comes to getting your paws on the Liam McCarthy there’s no point at all in having a centre-forward blessed only with the most beautiful wrists, tasty flicks and poetic movements. When circumstances demand he must also be able to hold his own in a spell of ‘ground hurling’. He needs to be, well, combative, or else he’s going nowhere.
That’s why we should all be delighted that we’ve chosen selfconfessed ‘combative’, no-nonsense, tough guy Robert Watt as secretary general of the Department of Health – and endowed him with a high-voltage annual wedge of €300,000 a year.
At the Oireachtas Health Committee meeting this week poor Senator Martin Conway of Fine Gael attempted to put a bit of manners on Robert Watt by criticising the ‘combative nature’ of his answers. Considering how de rigueur is meek and mild, inoffensive blandness these days, you’d have thought Watt would have dialled back a little and accepted the slap with quiet resignation. Think again.
Watt dropped the sliotar on the grass and whipped. He told Conway: ‘That’s a trait, you love it or you hate it, there’s nothing I can do about it.’
Which in the vernacular means – ‘Lookit, that’s the way I do business, but I’m happy in my own skin. This is me, get used to it.’
Now everybody knows what’s Watt. Tackle hard and you’ll get it back with interest.
And that’s precisely the kind of leader we now need to deliver a health system in Ireland that’s fit for purpose. One that doesn’t have the (weary) bones of a million people on lengthening waiting lists; that doesn’t have children screaming in pain because necessary and timely scoliosis and orthopaedic surgeries are cruelly denied to them; that doesn’t balls up so dramatically as to send women to early graves as happened in CervicalCheck; that doesn’t turn a blind eye to sexual abuse in its own facility; that doesn’t poison and seriously harm children through over-medication and misdiagnoses, as occurred in the mental health service in south Kerry.
Watt’s greatest challenge now is to orchestrate the delivery of Sláintecare, that elusive promised land of single-tier healthcare where treatment is on the basis of need and where health insurance is not required to jump queues for timely treatment.
This will involve the breakup of the current HSE behemoth into six regional areas, where managements are meant to be focused on service and delivery on a smaller geographical scale.
World-class and lifelong entrepreneur Richard Branson has always believed that small is better than large, that small is more nimble and more customer-focused. That’s exactly what is needed now in healthcare, where historically the customer/patient has never truly been front and centre of all considerations, as should be.
ROBERT Watt’s combative style will be required to dismantle tin-pot empires that currently exist in the HSE, and to discourage managers and warm-place-seekers who put self-interest before public interest. But, most of all, he needs to overlay the entire operation with the principle of accountability, as Donegal TD Thomas Pringle has been pleading for ages. Deputy Pringle’s demand for accountability has, of course, assumed greater urgency following the Brandon report, which revealed how staff were aware of the sexual abuse of disabled residents in a HSE-run facility.
Pringle and everybody else knows – with the exception of the HSE – when nobody is ever held to account, or blamed or pays the price for incompetence that performance becomes nothing more than hit-and-miss, and depends on the individual commitment which always goes unrewarded.
Covid has provided the most remarkably efficient shield for those in the HSE who have thrived on under-performance. Now that the pandemic fog is clearing we’ll be able to fix our gaze more sharply on healthcare reform.
We’ll be able to see if 2.2million people (40% of the population) ever gain enough confidence to abandon their private health insurance that currently guarantees care in a country where healthcare is such a manifest failure.
And we’ll see if Robert Watt’s combative style delivers success.
Ground hurling is good, but only as a means to the desired outcome.