People are turning to the Society of St Vincent de Paul to help them pay doctors' bills, a conference heard yesterday.
Families on low pay and without medical cards are putting off going to the doctor and cannot afford to buy medicine, the conference was told.
The conference, "Health Inequalities and Poverty", was organised by the Society of St Vincent de Paul (SVP). Speakers condemned a system in which public patients waited for lengthy periods for treatment while those who could afford to pay were fast-tracked.
Mr John Monaghan, chairman of the SVP's National Social Policy Committee, said the right to adequate healthcare should be inserted in the Constitution. Medical necessity and not economics should be the dominating principle, he said.
People on low pay and above the income limits for medical cards often could not afford to pay for doctors or medicines, he said. "We have cases where families put off going to a doctor," he added. "There isn't a conference [of the SVP] in the country which isn't paying out money for doctors' bills every day of the week."
He complained of different treatment of public and private patients by hospitals. "A woman was discharged from hospital six days after a hysterectomy and developed an infection," he said. "This woman is a medical card holder who had to wait 18 months for this operation. She had never really recovered. "By contrast, the same week a member of the local [SVP] conference, with private health insurance, had a similar operation. She remained in hospital for three weeks and fully recovered."
A woman in her 70s with gangrene in both feet was told she could not get a hospital bed for five weeks - but when the SVP offered to pay for her accommodation a bed was found immediately.
He described as "cruel" the practice of discharging mentally ill patients into communities in which there is a serious lack of psychiatric care. Ms Mary Kenny, who works in an SVP shelter in Dublin, said: "The number of psychiatric people within the hostels and among the homeless is an indictment of de-institutionalisation."
Ms Ann Dayman, from the Cherry Orchard Resource Centre in Dublin, said women living in poverty take care of the health of their children and husband/partner first.
Where they have a hospital appointment it is impractical to bring two or three children with them on a bus and they may have nobody to mind the children.
"We would like in our area a mobile unit to do some of the tests and cut down on the waiting and expense. We had them in the 1940s and 1950s. Why not have them now, and perhaps some of the women will live to old age as a result?"
Yesterday's conference was chaired by Dr Muiris Heuston, Medical Correspondent of The Irish Times.
pomorain@irish-times.ie