Common sense rather than theory would guide health service reform over the next 2½ years, the new Minister for Health said yesterday.
On Ms Harney's first meeting with a group of health professionals since her appointment, she said the reforms which were needed and which would take place would not be driven by any ideology but by the best interests of patients.
Addressing delegates at the annual conference of the Irish Association of Directors of Nursing and Midwifery, she said she wanted to turn the health service into a place where people wanted to work and she wanted to ensure people did not have to depend on health insurance or money to access the best quality of care as close as possible to where they lived when they needed it.
Ms Harney said she had visited several hospitals recently when her mother was ill and it gave her the opportunity to see things from the ground up.
"And sometimes if you actually do that you learn an awful lot more than reading some of these fancy reports that cost an awful lot of money," she said.
"I'm a person that likes to have a practical approach to what it is I do and it doesn't matter about the theory if it works in practice. That's what will guide our reform programme."
She reiterated that it was not good enough for people to have to spend 12 hours or more on a trolley in A&E and not good enough that elderly people were in hospital beds when they should be in aftercare facilities.
She planned to prioritise these issues, in addition to cutting waiting lists and providing better cancer services "as close as possible" to where people lived.
"I want in particular to concentrate in this period of the Department of Health on dealing with the problems that confront people when they are sick.
"There are long-term issues to do with health promotion which clearly are important for the future but my priority for the moment is going to be dealing with issues that confront people when they're sick because if you don't have a focused agenda I could spend all of my time at wonderful meetings, working very hard, feeling very exhausted at the end of the day, giving myself a clap on the back because I've opened this and opened that and achieved very little else and I don't want that.
"I want to achieve during this short period," she said.
"Let's not get hung up on ideologies, on who does what or where it's done or how it's done.
"If it works we'll make it happen. The reform will only be driven by what's in the interests of patients and what makes common sense. And we are not going to go around the country scaring everybody that places are going to be closed and services are going to be withdrawn.
"We've got to bring the public with us. People have got to see what this means," she added.
Last night, Ms Harney said she wanted a deadline for discussions on contracts and insurance for consultants. She said there was "an urgency" to resolving the issue of consultants' contracts. "We can't have an open-ended discussion going on forever."
She wanted "all issues on the table" both contracts and insurance, and rejected suggestions that she was trying to coerce the consultants. "There are no guns to anybody's head," she said.