The Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has warned against the country heading, unheedingly, too far down the road of choice, competition, consumerism and commodification in relation to the provision of health services.
Delivering the Irish Medical Organisation’s Doolin annual lecture today, she said that if the health service was to reflect social solidarity “we need to look carefully at any developments which removed healthcare from the communal public arena and re-located it in the private arena of the marketplace.
She said that a state's public health service should amount to far more than arrangements to ensure services are provided.
“The context in which services are provided, the institutions providing them, the financing of the services, the governance arrangements for those services, the extent to which one is entitled to services - these are all factors which both reflect and support the maintenance of the kind of society we want to be.”
“Health services made available on the basis of the exercise of consumer choice within a purely commercial private market do nothing to promote social solidarity or good citizenship.”
However, Ms O’Reilly warned that on the other hand, services provided through state agencies which were dysfunctional were not the answer either.
