A round-up of today's other health news in brief
Phone line row leaves patients out of touch
A ROW over who should fix a faulty phone line has left thousands of HSE patients unable to contact a public health service in the northwest.
Patients needing prescriptions, counselling and appointments have been unable to call the Primary Health Care Centre in Letterkenny, Co Donegal, for most of the past three weeks. During that time telephones at the centre have been ringing out.
The phone lines did come back into operation for a couple of days . Eircom says its engineers have checked the lines and says the fault does not rest with it.
The fault was reported on August 5th and again on August 10th. A team of Eircom engineers thought they had fixed it on August 11th, but a couple of days later, the phone lines were again down.
An Eircom spokesman said it had now done all it could to rectify the problem.
“Further investigation by the Eircom technical support team has concluded that this issue appears to relate to the customer’s internal phone system,” he said.
Sources at the centre say the phone lines have been down again since last week. They say patients are getting very frustrated with the service.
Last night, the HSE said it was aware of the situation and had tried to contact all affected patients by letter.
A spokesperson said while it understood that patients were anxious about not being able to contact the centre, the HSE was doing all it could to rectify the situation.
“We have contacted Eircom and they are working on the problem.”
Water before food helps weight loss
DRINKING WATER before meals can help dieters shed extra pounds, according to a new study.
People can lose an average of 2.3kg more if they drink two cups of water before meals, three times a day.
Findings from the study were presented at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston. Dr Brenda Davy, senior author on the study, said it was the first randomised controlled trial looking at water consumption and dieting.
Irish families report good experiences with au pairs
More than 70 per cent of Irish families believe having an au pair is a positive experience, according to the results of a survey which were released yesterday.
Cheaper childcare is the most common reason (51 per cent) for taking an au pair, while for 18 per cent of parents, cover for irregular working hours is the main attraction.
Half of those surveyed by the parenting website Rollercoaster.ie described the au pair’s relationship with their child as “excellent”, while another 32 per cent reported it to be “good”.
Some 36 per cent of parents said their own relationship with the au pair was excellent, and 48 per cent put it at good.
Just 4 per cent said they had a “bad” relationship, while 6 per cent “strongly disagreed” with the idea that having an au pair was a positive experience for the family.
The online survey of 110 parents found that au pairs from France were most popular (20 per cent), followed by Germany (17 per cent), eastern Europe (12 per cent) and Spain (11 per cent).
Almost half of parents (42 per cent) use au pair agencies, but one quarter (25 per cent) make their own arrangements through the internet.
The once popular notion of having an au pair for the school holidays seems outdated, with only 7 per cent of parents saying this was the reason they had taken on an au pair.
In the majority of cases (37 per cent), au pairs stay for six to 12 months, while 14 per cent stay for more than a year.
