Dear Minister Harney,
I have admired your guts and your work ethic for many years, but Mary, the health system is a crock!
A relative of mine (late 80s) was ambulanced to hospital yesterday morning.
He spent four and a half hours on a trolly in A&E, before being ambulanced to a second hospital for a scan.
The machine to perform the scan was available in hospital one, but these hospitals take turns to roster people to perform the scans at weekends. Saving money, I suppose, Mary... EXCEPT that hiring three ambulance crews on a Saturday (double time!) can't surely be cheaper than paying one or two scan people?????? Six crews actually, making 18 people, because there are two shifts.
Four hours more of lying on another trolley in hospital two, the scan was performed.
Three more hours were spent waiting for an ambulance crew to become available, to take the poor octogenarian back to hospital one. No, Mary, they were not rushed off their feet, they were on a break, then they changed shift, then it took a while to get cracking = 3 hours.
Back at hospital one, the octogenarian lay on yet another trolly in A&E waiting for a bed there all over again. Five hours more and a bed was sorted.
It was wretched. 17 hours of awfulness.
It was not an isolated incident.
Everyone we met was waiting for horrendous hours upon hours.
The stupendous lack of organisation and plain stupidity was evident on a huge scale in both hospitals.
Mary, please, for Ireland's sake, sort it, would you, please?
Mairéad.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
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4 comments:
I'm sorry your relative had to endure all that messing around. The system's in organisational meltdown, largely because of ideologically-driven political interference and lobby interests. And the minister is useless at her job, which is to oversee the workings of an efficient public healthcare service for all the citizenry. Rather than lining the pockets of hospital developers and the health insurance sector.
Thanks Conan. The insanity continues hereabouts!
I feel that every single Dept of this Gov is bad, bad, bad.
A fwe years ago while I was home, my mother ended up in Tralee General A&E, I don't have the time or energy to write up the experience here, but outside of the endless amount of time spent there, the physical condition of the rooms was worse than I would have expected in a prison.
Sorry to hear that, John, but NOT surprised.
The whole system needs kicking.
Consultants are so important, they think they can say what the Hell they like to people, but seldom "consult"; and I haven't seen any "nursing" being done for years.
I think we need new titles for the medical professionals??
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