Sir, – I encountered a public patient just this week who had a minor surgical procedure in a local hospital recently and was thereafter visited at home on a daily basis for two weeks by private company nurses to dress his wound.
These nurses would largely appear to have been commuting from Dublin to Monaghan to perform a simple dressing procedure that could easily have been facilitated in my surgery by one of our practice nurses.
I can only imagine what the overall cost to the health service was in treating him thus and have no doubt it could have been performed at a fraction of the overall cost in his local GP practice.
How can there be a budget for this type of stuff while the country’s GP services are being simultaneously starved of funding? This would be bread-and-butter GP practice stuff in a normally functioning health service that had “money following the patient” as a basic tenet of operation.
Surely it is time for someone to start joining the dots? Is there a deliberate management strategy to needlessly waste taxpayers’ money in our health service? – Yours, etc,
Dr SHANE CORR,
Carrickmacross,
Co Monaghan.