Read this Harney
Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the appalling state of our health service.
What has changed since?
Actually quite a lot has happened.
A few hospitals have closed. MRSA is rampant in the remaining hospitals. They had the mighty cock up where women who had been given the all clear had to be recalled to be told they had breast cancer. A few more people have died. Seventeen billion has been pumped into the system and vanished.
And Mary Harney has congratulated herself and accepted a massive pay hike.
I have been following an unfolding story for the last couple of months over at Avoiding Life One Post at a Time. I have been reading it with mounting horror and disgust.
The story starts in October – Girl Trouble and the Irish Health System. Note that this is October the 24th – Nearly two months ago.
We move on a couple of weeks to Health Update. Here is a young woman who urgently need tests and so far has gotten nowhere.
By December the 1st she is Still Waiting. At this stage she still hasn’t even got an appointment.
By yesterday [December the 11th] she says There seems to be a bit of interest… But not from the health service.
Today she writes I am Overwhelmed… She is overwhelmed by the response from the blogging community; not the health service.
Harney keeps saying that there is no crisis. She keeps blaming the Health Services Executive. The HSE blames the consultants. The consultants blame lack of funds and bad management.
The health service is in a state of crisis. It used to work. It was inefficient, but it worked. Harney has ripped it asunder, and now it hardly works at all. As "Minister for Health" she is ultimately responsible for the state of the health service, whether she likes it or not. If she were running a business in this manner, she would have been fired years ago. She is a disgrace to herself, her country and her gender.
I will leave this rant by quoting a couple of extracts from the blog..
"…..I am still waiting for an appointment with the breast people. I’m still bleeding and still have some other stuff going on. No one cares."
"If Mary Harney found a lump in her breast would she be waiting this long? I think not. I am angry and frustrated and I don’t know where to go from here. Shit…"
I’ve just been reading her blog, and I don’t even know where to start. Shocking.
Thanks for drawing some attention to this Grandad. Going public tomorrow on The Last Word. Hopefully it will help… but honestly I have my doubts. They might make some half assed attempt to help me, but I know I’m not the only one waiting on a now imaginary list!
OFTR – The reason I didn’t write up to now.. I didn’t know where to start.
D – Sh*t. What can I say? I am absolutely livid with that so called health service. Maybe from all the blogging, the ‘mainstream’ media might pick it up? The very best of luck!
carbon copy of the Canadian Health System…actually I shouldn’t complain …. I couldn’t run something that badly even if I tried…so I guess there is a certain skill level there…you couldn’t bollocks it up that bad with out some talent…
Twenty linked to her the other day and I drilled down through all her posts and I was absolutely shocked.
It goes back to what I was saying before about the government and its departments acting like they are a company. The HSE think that a hiring freeze and cutting services across the country are a way towards improving efficiency?
It is my f*ck.
They have no shareholders to appease. What they do have is a public that expect at the very least competent diagnosis’, private or not.
Yesterdays (Wed.) Irish Examiner had an article about an ambulance driver who brought his wife to the A&E in Cork University Hospital with a perforated ulcer. He knew she was in dire straits and they were largely ignored. He watched her die on a trolley in the only place where if she had been attended to she would have survived.
The mix up was because it took 15 hours for the files to reach her consultant. During the interim no one could find them and she had died many hours before her records were located.
Believe it or not but the Gardai were brought in to investigate the circumstances surrounding her death. From yesterdays enquiry her husband was awarded €600,000.
The HSE paying out that much money after a garda investigation is to me at least an admission of failing to provide the services for which they are tasked.
The scary thing is that they can and will quite happily pay that amount of money and they will do so again and again and again without addressing the root causes of that person dying while supposedly in their care.
€600,000 is 20 nurses at €30,000 per year.
Forgot to add in my rant that Cork University Hospital is supposed to be one of the new HSE centres of Excellence™
If I hear any more about these so called “Centres of Excellence” I will scream. They are nothing more than a fancy named excuse for closing hospitals,