Tell us where it hurts
Frozen food from afar for our sick and infirm? Some Gore nurses down the road? Let’s not anybody pretend that cuts like these constitute trimming fat from the health system.
As the Southern District Health Board starts to comply with the stark ‘‘just do it’’ message from its overlords to address eye-watering budget overruns, public unease is mounting about what lies ahead.
There’s a particular sense of unreasonableness that Gore Health that will be first up to lose medical staff. You could say it’s likely to be only ‘‘several’’ nurses but the locals are ready to attest the significance in such a tightlyrun operation.
What’s more, it would be hard to find an outfit more virtuous than Gore Health as case study not only in living as best it can with budgetary constraints, but also showing impressive innovation.
This is a portent of what’s to come; early casualties in in a process that clearly puts the screws on services. The health board, it seems, is no longer able to sustain us in the manner to which we have become accustomed. Apparently, we’ve been spoilt.
The first of the ugly decisions has been made in the area of food services. Will the board’s decision to outsource the contract to the Compass Group, and have frozen meals trucked from the other end of the country, stack up?
It’s fair to say the south isn’t overbrimming with conspicuous optimism on that score, and not only for reasons of local protectiveness. Concern is due in no small part to the fact that the ‘‘trust us’’ nature of the board’s dealings so far, which have been, sure enough, treated as commercially sensitive.
Sure enough, commercial sensitivity means social insensitivity, at least as far as openness is concerned. A problem that’s endemic at health board level. The pledge boils down to this: for all the upset of job losses for local food preparation staff, and changes to supply contracts caused by outsourcing the food preparation services to a multinational corporation, the benefit will be sorely needed financial savings. The concern isn’t just that hospital food will be nastier, regrettable as that would be. It’s that having a centralised supply will be less reactive to the needs of individual patients with particular dietary needs, less reliable in times of transport disruption, and that food handling will be less safe. Now that would be intolerable. On such matters the message from the board is emphatic. We need not be concerned. But we are.