Madam, - I was bewildered by Prof Gerard Bury's letter of November 5th attacking the nature and rigour of the quality assurance processes of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organisations. This is a body that is in existence for some 50 years and is the longest established accreditation agency in the world - and the fact is that a number of our member hospitals have been successfully accredited by that body.
Suffice it to say that world-class hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic, John Hopkins Hospital, Sloan-Kettering and the Cleveland Clinic are happy to be accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organisations. I might also point out that at the time the Irish hospitals sought this accreditation, no hospital accreditation whatever existed in Ireland.
The quality of the care provided by members of the Independent Hospital Association of Ireland is attested by the fact that, over the decades, they have successfully treated hundreds of thousands of patients, over 180,000 last year alone. In addition these hospitals were called upon by the National Treatment Purchase Fund to help reduce public waiting lists for many procedures. The high standard of care is not altogether surprising in that the medical consultants involved mainly work across both privately and publicly owned hospitals, while other staff undergo the same rigorous education and training as their counterparts in the public system.
It is an obvious fact that if the independent hospital sector and its 2,300 hospital beds did not exist, these patients would have to be treated by an already overburdened public hospital system. - Yours, etc,
Dr DANNY O'HARE, Chairman, Independent Hospital Association of Ireland, Lower Baggot Street, Dublin 2.