Heart Beat Maurice Neligan "Doctors is all swabs"No, it's not a quote from the Minister for Trolleys, or even from her colleague Michael McDowell. It's not even from Brian Cowen who writes a good fairy tale himself, eg that great yawn, the National Development Plan, sadly a turkey, if there ever was one.
No, of course it's from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. The Minister and her cohorts in exposing the greed, venality and whatever other insult they can think of to throw at the hospital consultants are hardly original thinkers.
They've been insulted by better folk than you. Heraclites, 500 BC wrote: "Doctors cut, burn and torture the sick and then demand of them an undeserved fee for such services." John Earle writing circa 1640 declaimed: "The best cure he [ the physician] has done is upon his own purse, which from a leane sickliness, he had made lusty and in flesh."
I guess we've always had a bad press and possibly always will. Now the Minister for Trolleys is going to sort us out and the Irish health service will lead the world once more.
I ask you, do I look like a prophet? Aeons ago I foretold this. Total lack of understanding of, and failure to redress, the manifest, multiple woes of the health service, led us inevitably to this point. The political response is ingrained in those in power in Ireland. Never take responsibility yourself; blame someone else.
In this case the consultants are the whipping boys: 1,500 extra consultants paid, say €300 million, just to sit around and look at the wall, the same as those in service do now, those who do not have the facilities to do their job.
Wow everybody is trembling! Well almost everybody, not you and your mates, who make damn sure to carry sufficient private health insurance so you can get to those lazy neglectful bastards of category two consultants should illness strike. The same category two consultants who operate in the private sector on the patients referred from your other great "success", the National Treatment Purchase Fund. Don't tell us that you thought the fairies operated upon them.
In any case it hardly matters whether 1,500 new heads or pairs of hands are introduced, apart from costing more, it will make no difference.
The system is short 3,500-4,000 beds. It is as simple as that. Until they are provided, the health service can never work. You can commission endless useless reports, which nobody ever seems to read, public money can be squandered recklessly, eg PPARS, you can bring light and happiness to myriad developers in the private sector, yet the basic facilities to allow our people to be treated quickly and with dignity are lacking.
It is quite nauseating to hear the rhetoric of "equity of access" preached by those who have the parachute of private insurance fixed firmly to their backs. I was taught that this was called hypocrisy.
It gets worse. The doctors agree to unconditional talks, time limited. The initial response is no, since they voted no confidence in the HSE. I ask myself, what planet is she living on? It might have escaped her notice that many, not only in the medical profession, but also in politics and the wider world of those forgotten folk, the patients, have likewise reposed little or no confidence in the HSE.
Having mentioned squander mania in Government circles both today and previously, I find myself with another little problem. Doubtless somebody out there can explain it to me simply and logically. We are apparently to have a referendum in March.
I have no cavil with the subject matter of such and doubtless it will be fully explained before the day. My problem is more practical. Presumably referenda cost lots of money and they certainly cause a lot of disruption, in governance and education. Why then, since we are due a general election in May/June, can we not hold all on the same day, thus avoiding considerable expense? My late mother used to say: "look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves". I think the concept was called thrift. Perhaps the Government could employ a firm of consultants to see if there is any merit in this quaint notion?
In the midst of all this drama, ordinary life must be led. I have not written for some time about diet and weight, particularly my own.
In my wildest dreams I did not anticipate that the Highest Authority would present me with an electronic weighing scale over Christmas. That's a thoughtful present folks (she reads this), but it left me in the ludicrous position of getting three different weights on three different scales. They were all different. I don't know actually what weight I am, but I do know that since the start of this crusade at the end of September I am over two stone lighter.
Do I feel different? Yes, although this may be partly psychological. It makes the exercise component of weight loss much easier and if I continue at the present rate, I could well disappear. The other gratifying aspect was that it did not prove too difficult. I simply ate less and exercised more. The exercise consisted of golf and walking. The latter, as I did not walk around with my eyes closed, brought some interesting things to my notice, which I will share with youagain.
Dr Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon.