Madam, - Is is just me, or is our healthcare system being deliberately run into the ground? Like many other seriously ill patients, my 82-year old grandmother recently spent over 48 hours waiting for a bed in the Mater Hospital Accident and Emergency Dept.
She spent the first 24 hours sitting in a chair in the corridor, and the next 24 hours lying on a trolley. I spent some time sitting with her and observed the pitiful scene. Very ill people, mostly elderly, exposed to the glare of the public, stripped of their dignity as they wait uncomfortably for the chance of a bed.
Irish hospitals, it appears, have a policy of not offering beds to many seriously ill patients. Instead, patients are expected to wait for days, in a chair, or a trolley (if they are lucky). The core business of the health system is caring for people. It is failing miserably to provide an adequate service.
There are clearly far too many health boards, and these should be consolidated without delay.
There are also too many nameless, faceless managers and administrators failing miserably at running our hospitals. They need to be made more accountable and scrutinised more closely.
But most importantly of all, we need to increase the number of available beds. The bed count has still not recovered from the disastrous cutbacks suffered in the 1980s. Please provide more hospital beds now. - Yours, etc.,
STEVE MCCARTHY, Skerries, Dublin.
Madam, - Congratulations to Maev-Ann Wren for her excellent series of articles on our two-tier health system.
Clearly, one of the major obstacles to reform is the attitude of consultants, who insist on their right to maintain a private practice, even though they are handsomely paid by the State, in the comparison with their counterparts in other countries, to treat public patients.
How does Finbarr Fitzpatrick, the secretary-general of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association, justify this intransigence? Is it not just a case of sheer unadulterated greed?
I am reminded of a remark made by a Danish consultant in Ms Wren's series of articles two years ago, in which she compared the health systems of various countries. He remarked that "private health insurance would be anathema in Denmark".
Clearly, his Irish counterparts are motivated by more mercenary considerations, which are somewhat at variance with the Hippocratic oath they took when they entered the medical profession.
Hospital consultants may not like being compared with taxi drivers, but the principle remains the same: vested interests must be confronted by politicians for the common good. Is the political will there to do this, or must we always be plagued by a two-tier health system, lurching from crisis to crisis, while a country with a population 16 times greater than ours, namely France, has a much fairer health system, which operates on the principle that treatment is dictated by need not greed? - Yours, etc.,
JOE PATTON, Hillcrest Walk, Lucan, Co Dublin.