GROUPS REPRESENTING doctors and nurses have warned of the serious risks to patient safety because of cutbacks and the moratorium on recruitment, the full effects of which they claim will begin to be seen this week.
The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) and the Irish Nurses’ Organisation (INO) held an “unprecedented” joint press conference to warn the public there will be a “huge crisis” in the delivery of services.
They claim that the way cutbacks have been planned “in an unco-ordinated and ill-advised fashion” puts services at risk and will create inefficiencies and compound existing problems.
They highlight that hospital services are already so stretched that they will not be able to cope with a potential epidemic or pandemic such as swine flu. There were 340 people on average on trolleys every day in April waiting for beds, a 64 per cent increase in the past two years. Waiting lists at Crumlin children’s hospital will go back to the high levels of the 1980s following a 10 per cent cut across the hospital resulting in the closure of 25 beds, they also claim.
INO president Sheila Dickson said the heating was left off every night last week in St Columbanus Home, a care of the elderly facility in Killarney, Kerry. “The heating came on during the day. We’re still waiting for a full explanation. This is how vulnerable patients are suffering from frontline services being cut,” she said.
But the HSE rejected the claim. A spokeswoman said heating in St Columbanus Home “remains turned on 24/7 all year round”.
There was a fault in the boiler on April 27th which was repaired as soon as it was reported the next morning, she said. A fault recurred the following morning, was reported immediately and the heating was working again that evening. Prof Seán Tierney, vice-president of the IMO and a vascular surgeon at Tallaght hospital said a “very blunt instrument” was being used in banning recruitment when with “a little bit more intelligence” savings could be made and efficiencies gained.
But blanket decisions to ban recruitment would have an effect “disproprotionate to the amount of money that will be saved”.
He said Ireland had the highest hospital bed occupancy in the OECD at over 85 per cent, and in Tallaght there was a huge difficulty in coping with the waiting list for planned elective surgery and it was “emergency or urgent care only”.
He also said that despite the withdrawal of tax breaks by the Minister for Finance in the Budget, “we have the scenario where the HSE still have an office and staff”. INO general secretary Liam Doran said neither organisation would not rule out protests but “what we’d much prefer is engagement”. Linda Phelan a nurse manager at Crumlin hospital said there was a €9 million deficit this year and to deal with that “we’re cutting 25 beds. So a full ward will close and that will result in a 10 per cent cut in all services right across the hospital”.
She warned that the non-emergency elective surgery waiting list in the hospital would get longer and “eventually some of these patients will turn up in AE, take away more beds and it will just become a vicious circle. Children will just be back to the same waiting lists they were on in the 1980s.” She said “this is just the start. It’s not the finish”.
Dr Michael Mehigan, a GP, warned that “general practice will come to a screeching halt” because of the Government’s failure to properly fund its own primary care strategy, launched in 2001. “Just as doctors are trying to develop clinics and produce the type of capacity that could absorb the offload from the hospitals, funding has now been cut.”
