SIPTU branches throughout Munster, with a membership of 63,000 trade unionists, are to lobby politicians in their areas before the general election, to highlight the inadequacies in the health system.
Some 40 full-time and part-time branches in Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary will be involved in the campaign, according to SIPTU regional secretary, Mr Joe O'Flynn.
Already, a campaign pack has been sent out to 8,000 SIPTU members throughout the State as part of the nationwide effort by the union to highlight what it describes as "the fundamental inequality in the present health system which can no longer be tolerated".
Mr O'Flynn said that between 1980 and 1996, Ireland reduced its health spending as a proportion of GDP by 20 per cent, resulting in the most widespread programme of hospital closures and cut-backs ever known in the Republic. The Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy's "Thatcherite policies" had further eroded the health service and left it worse than ever, he added. There were now more than 26,000 people on public waiting lists for in-patient operations while one in 15 people covered by the General Medical Services Scheme (GMS) were on waiting lists compared to only one in 50 of those with private medical health insurance.
Similarly, private patients waited only eight weeks for a hospital bed while medical card hold- ers had to wait up to 16 weeks.
The Southern Health Board had reported a shortfall of 230 beds in community care hospitals and admitted recently that 28 patients in its care had been waiting for over seven years to see a surgeon.
Out of 27 members of the OECD Ireland's total health spending as a percentage of GDP was 6.1 per cent as against an average of 8.3 per cent. The European average for hospital beds was 4.2 per 1,000 population while the average in Ireland was only 6.1 per cent, and, according to the Health Employers' Agency, some 1,300 nursing vacancies nationwide remained unfilled.