HEART BEAT:With beds full, Cork feels the strain in the AE department
THE POWER of prayer isn't all it's cracked up to be. I had two straightforward requests last week, so I put in the word.
Now I accept that the €18 million Lotto was a bit of an ask, but what about the Captain's Prize in Dooks? That very modest ambition foundered on the very first hole of the competition. How's that for a celestial thumbs down?
An unremitting westerly near-gale exposed the weaknesses in my game - in other words, just about everything. I am conscious that age is not on my side in this limited ambition, but if you're listening Lord, I'll settle for the Lotto, even into extreme old age, and while you're at it you might as well make it a big one.
The Highest Authority has gone to spread light around Killarney, and peace reigns over this remote spot. That sounds a bit odd, but you know what I mean.
The same gale that ruined my golf yesterday persists, now ushering in curtains of rain. I have just been swimming, acquiring my exercise quotient and a sense of wellbeing simultaneously. It took the little bit of willpower I possess, but it's too easy to vegetate and I sincerely believe it is extremely important to exercise.
A reader from Cork wrote to me recently, suggesting that the money from the Lotto could be used for a few years to improve the infrastructure of the health service. This seemed sensible to me, but I doubt if this easy vehicle for political patronage would be readily diverted. Cork, the problems of the health service, the non-solution of the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), the cancer strategy and "centres of excellence", even co-location, all combined during the past week to provide an illustrative vignette of the shambles that constitutes our system.
I am familiar with the high standards of medical practice in Cork city and county, and I can assure you that when the doctors and nurses there tell us that they have major problems, you can be certain that such is undoubtedly the case.
In the first instance, a surgeon from Cork vented his frustration with patient treatment in an e-mail to management and colleagues, which, surprisingly, leaked into the public domain. Management in Cork refuted his claims; fancy that. Then most of his colleagues signed a letter in his support and the nursing organisations also expressed their support over his disquiet with standards.
It is common knowledge that the AE department in Cork University Hospital has been under great strain for a long time, and that consultants and nursing staff have repeatedly drawn attention to this and to the chronic understaffing that is a part of the problem. The trolley count there remains stubbornly high. Trolleys are there because beds are full.
Colleagues in Cork have told me of their problems in trying to admit patients from the waiting lists for investigation or treatment because there are no beds. An unanswerable point made by the protesting surgeon in his e-mail was the ludicrous proposition to cram the breast surgery element of the cancer strategy into an institution that was already full.
Clinicians and interested parties in Mallow and Tralee, in the Victoria and Mercy hospitals, are concerned that they will lose capable working services in the move to a designated "centre of excellence".
It takes more than designation to provide such a centre. It takes development, bricks and mortar, additional staffing and equipment and, above all, the dirty word: beds. It takes planning and money, and whatever about the deficiencies of the former, it will strike everybody that the latter is in short supply.
Cutbacks, and that is what they are, are a fact of life in the health services in Cork as they are elsewhere throughout the country. Services have been slashed in Ennis, Mallow, Monaghan, Cavan, Sligo, Drogheda, and Castlebar - the list is endless.
All we have in replacement is talk, evasion and dishonesty. The last state is clearly worse than the first. This is worse than dishonesty. It is an outrage.
Nothing is in place either in structure or staffing to replace what is being lost. Patients and communities are being betrayed by the reverse Robin Hood strategy of the Minister and her minions. What is happening is the privatisation of our health service, the despoliation of the poor for the benefit of investors, developers and their unregulated institutions.
Time to say stop - and this brings me back to Cork and the NTPF.