The Irish health service is not somewhere you should ever want to go

The Irish health service is not somewhere you should ever want to go
The spectacle of a senior politician only noticing the crisis in hospitals because her own child got sick is hard to stomach, writes John McGuirk

The old American adage that there are only two things certain in life: death, and taxes, is only partially true. There is, of course, another certainty, and that is that at some point in your life, you will become sick and need medical treatment. For those of us who are blessed with good health, the prospect might be years away; for others, especially the old, and the very poor, illness is a fact of life.

Because of this, the Government spends around €17 billion of our money every year on the health service. To put that in context, because human beings find it very difficult to understand the sheer scale of large numbers, or the difference between millions and billions, a person earning €100,000 every year would have to work for ten years to earn a million. To earn €17 billion, they would have to work for 170,000 years.

It is a staggering sum.

We spend it all because looking after each other when we are sick is the basic measure of a civilised, and Christian, society. It shouldn’t matter who you are, or what you are worth, or what you have done in your life. When you are sick, we come together, as a people, and make sure you are looked after. Done properly, state funded healthcare is something that we should all be proud of.

Vast sums

To manage the health system, we elect politicians and put them in charge of it. We give them these vast sums of money, even though they’re just ordinary people like you and me and ask them to put it to use in a way that makes sure that everyone gets the treatment they need, when they need it.

Because the budget is so huge, and politicians are human, a degree of waste and mismanagement is inevitable. As you might expect, most of the money goes on salaries. A surprising amount goes on drugs and medicines, which are very expensive. And annually, tens of millions are spent on consultants reports and the like to try and get the whole thing to run better.

And yet, in University Hospital Limerick last week, a 90-year-old woman was left for two full days without basic pain medication. Imagine that – two days to get a painkiller, because of overcrowding, awful management, and, you can bet, the politeness of an old woman who suffered the indignity of lying on a trolley in crippling pain rather than complain about people who she probably assumed were just doing their best.

The woman’s story is not an unusual one. The fact is that for most people who have ever experienced it up close, the Irish health service is not somewhere you should ever want to go. Overcrowding, delays, endless waiting, and the very real chance that you could leave a hospital sicker than when you went into it because of a hospital bug – that’s the real experience of many of us.

Every single one of them should have to spend at least one night a year in a busy A&E”

All of this we bear, when we have to bear it, because awful treatment is much better, unless you’re doomed to death anyway, than no treatment at all. But it’s not good enough.

Last week, in another hospital, in another part of the country, another patient was having a terrible experience. Early in the week, a 39-year-old mother of two found that one of her children was sick. Like any good mother, she took the child to Crumlin Children’s hospital. Afterwards, she said the following about her experience:

“I paid a visit to Crumlin A&E myself on Sunday evening with a child. It’s wholly unacceptable to my mind that a waiting room would have vomiting babies, breastfeeding mothers, head injury children, broken arm children, all in the one mix. In terms of provision of healthcare it’s really not acceptable in a country like this”

The woman concerned, of course, was Fine Gael TD Kate O’Connell. Deputy O’Connell is not only a Government TD, she is also a long-standing member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on health. In other words, she’s been one of the most senior politicians responsible for the health service for years. Yet this was, apparently, the very first time she had visited a hospital emergency room in that time. Isn’t that extraordinary?

Imagine a cattle farmer who went three years without looking at a field, or inside a calving shed. What state would his farm be in if he just left it to others?

We give politicians more money than most people can imagine and ask them to run a health service for us. What we have gotten in return looks, on many nights, in many hospitals, like a scene from the Bosnian wars. And now we have the spectacle of a senior politician, in charge of the whole thing, only realising the disaster that it is because her own child got sick and she had to visit a hospital.

Frankly, every single one of them should have to spend at least one night a year in a busy A&E department, talking to the nurses and the patients. How can you understand a problem, if you never see it?

And how, on earth, did the country elect, and put in charge of so much money, politicians who never think to look at how it’s being spent until they, themselves, get sick? Much like the cattle of a farmer who didn’t look at them for three years, the sick people of Ireland are not in safe hands with this Government.

As Ms. O’Connell has just found out, to her everlasting shame.