Sir, – Your edition of June 18th highlighted the crisis at University Hospital Limerick and the utter indignity for both patients, families and staff at the hospital (David Raleigh, “‘He had no privacy, no dignity’: Life and death at University Hospital Limerick”).
Why, might one ask that, after 25 or more years we continue to have such crises? I believe responsibility lies ultimately with our politicians who, among other failures, failed to rigorously examine HSE expert reports on reconfiguration of local hospital services. Your readers might find the following evidence supportive of that conclusion.
In an April 2008 report for the HSE by Horwarth Consulting Ireland Limited and Teamwork Management Services concerning the acute hospital services in the HSE Mid-West Region, a recommendation was made to reconfigure the services at University Hospital Limerick, Ennis, Nenagh and St John’s. It recommended University Hospital Limerick would require the provision of 676 beds resulting from the removal of 24-hour acute care at the other hospitals. In the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) report of June 17th, 2022, the number of beds at the hospital in mid-2020 was 432, 244 short of that recommended in 2008, 14 years after the HSE, the Department of Health and our politicians were aware of the need for 676 beds.
The former president of the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine in Ireland, Mr Fergal Hickey, constantly advised our politicians that the real problem in our A&E departments was the lack of hospital bed capacity. And yet our politicians have not fixed the problem.
Why?
In her book on Health, Medicine and Politics in Ireland 1900 to 1970, Ruth Barrington notes that healthcare is hotly debated in general elections, it does not determine the outcome of elections. Our deficient public hospital system infrastructure represents one of the great failures of political leadership over the last three decades. This is why leadership in politics in respect of healthcare is so important. A recent example of great leadership on healthcare was by Barack Obama introducing the Affordable Care Act in the United States in 2010 that has given an extra 31 million people in the US health insurance. He achieved this transformational policy against huge opposition from Republican and other conservatives. Sadly, we do not have a healthcare political leader as Mr Obama was, and sadly as a result, overcrowded, not fit for purpose A&E departments will be a feature of our health service for years to come. – Yours, etc,
Dr JOHN BARTON,
Galway.