Sir, – It is an absolute disgrace that we have so many people languishing, ill, on trollies in emergency departments. It is a national embarrassment that it takes three years to repair an arthritic hip, that a child may have their cardiac surgery cancelled eight times or that children with crippling scoliosis are left at the bottom of the hospital queue.
It is shameful that child and adolescent mental health services are absent in many parts of the country or are so overwhelmed in others that they cannot cater to the needs of mentally ill children.
A very basic tenet of health economics is that resources are scarce. The job of those in government is to decide how best these scarce resources are to be apportioned. In time we will hopefully be able to strive towards affordable universal healthcare. Until such time, spending money on extending “free” GP access arbitrarily by age to largely health cohorts, while we have some of the most vulnerable people in the community marooned far away from the life-changing interventions they so desperately require, is at best a fallacy and at worst an act of negligence. – Yours, etc,
Dr NIALL BREEN,
Killester,
Dublin 5.