A CONSULTANT has expressed concern that the health services are about to enter a period where resources are going to become more reliant on funding, and voluntary hospitals will have to depend on their own fundraising to replace old and dilapidated equipment.
Dr Adrian Brady, consultant radiologist at the Mercy University Hospital (MUH) in Cork, said that the hospital, like many healthcare enterprises in Ireland, may find itself in a situation where the needs of its patients exceed the funding available to care for them.
"We are now entering a period of contraction of resources. 'Rationing of healthcare' is an unhappy concept, but one with which we will be obliged to deal increasingly in the coming years," said Dr Brady.
"The state funding available to MUH is not, and will not be sufficient in the future to support and maintain the services we presently offer. It will not allow us to continue to improve the facilities available for our patients and their families."
Dr Brady was speaking at the launch of the Mercy University Hospital Foundation's campaign to raise almost €5 million to provide state of the art cancer treatment equipment at the voluntary hospital which caters for patients throughout Munster.
The Foundation was established as the official fundraising body of the Mercy University Hospital as part of its 150th anniversary celebrations last year and it has three main funds that it will focus on for its fundraising efforts over the period 2008-2010, he said.
Dr Brady explained that these include: the Men's Health and Prostate Cancer Fund with a fundraising target of €2.2 million; the Radiology Appeal with a fundraising target of €2 million and the Mercy Kids' Fund with a fundraising target of €500,000.
"As a consultant radiologist I want to focus in particular on the Radiology Appeal. The Foundation has made a commitment to purchase a new state of the art 64-slice CT scanner, which will cost approximately €1.2 million," he said.
Dr Brady said the radiology department currently performs more than 11,000 CT scans per year, scanning the entire age range of patients from very young to very old and serving all clinical services from paediatrics to medicine of the elderly.
"Our oncology service requires a massive amount of CT scanner time to diagnose cancer patients and to monitor them through their treatment. We do all this on a 4-slice scanner which entered service on September 2000, and is now outdated and in need of replacement.
"With our new 64-slice scanner, we will be able to offer enhanced services to patients, which cannot be provided at present. We will be able to get images with finer resolution, offering more certain and often earlier diagnoses of disease."
The new CT scanner will also allow radiologists to perform non-invasive cardiac and coronary imaging, services at present unavailable to its patients. This will enable patients be diverted from more-invasive forms of investigation to out-patient scanning.
"This will allow us obtain the same information more quickly and with less trauma. Crucially, we will be able to reduce the radiation dose obtained by patients during many CT investigations," said Dr Brady.