Madam, – There is a mote in Brendan Drumm’s eye. Accountability? The HSE chief executive, who heads a small politburo of advisors, is the “accounting officer” for a spend of €14 billion. He answers only to a praesidium of 12 ministerial appointees and the Minister for Health. Dáil questions take months instead of days to answer.
Transparency? Journalists are barred from even toothless regional forums. The 2004 Health Act contains several veils. “Confidentiality” covers “proposals of a commercial nature or tender”: the definition of these is a matter for the HSE. There is also the burka of “clinical judgment”, which prohibits queries relating to patient care and obliges patients to take their complaints to the Medical Council.
No shortages of frontline staff, beds, or hospitals? Ireland’s stock of acute public hospitals, beds and doctors falls gravely short of international standards, as stacked-up ambulances outside Dublin hospitals and 22,000 cancelled operations, year on year, attest.
The HSE’s politically driven “change” programme will close 40 of our 53 acute public hospitals, radically cutting access to essential services for hundreds of thousands.
Patient safety is being sacrificed to medical hubris, so that careers, reputations (and money) can be made from esoteric sub-specialities in prestigious urban academic institutions, while other hospitals that have served their communities well for decades are shut.
As technocratic and corporate interests engulf the social model of health in our elitist, warped and inequitable system, how convenient to be no longer hamstrung by a democratic health system, with its regional boards, public meetings reported by a pesky press, and pestilential politicians. – Yours, etc,
MARIE O’CONNOR,
Health Services Action Group,
Rathdown Road,
Dublin 7.