CAMPAIGNERS TO save acute services at the South Tipperary General Hospital (STHG) in Clonmel will meet the Minister for Health on Wednesday buoyed by a huge rally in the town on Saturday afternoon.
A crowd estimated by the organisers at between 15,000 and 20,000 attended the rally which filled the Main Guard in the centre of the town.
The rally was called to protest at proposals by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to reconfigure hospitals in the southeast by moving many of the acute services there to Waterford or Kilkenny.
The HSE has already announced that the St Michael’s acute mental health unit attached to the STHG will move to a new 50-bed unit in Kilkenny.
STHG consultant surgeon Peter Murchan told the crowd that the proposal did not come from “political government” and politicians from all parties were unhappy about the proposal.
Instead, it came from “bureaucrats who have decided that the services should be removed” just two years after it was officially reopened at a cost of €45 million.
He said the removal of acute services would reduce the hospital’s budget from €50 million to €17 million, smaller than the budget for many nursing homes and would make Clonmel less attractive for many of the pharmaceutical companies based there.
STHG senior physician Dr Paud O’Regan said reconfiguration was “another word for the centralisation of acute services”.
He warned that the closure of the AE would deprive many patients of the “golden hour” in which the lives of patients with severe trauma could be saved.
Patients in need of acute surgery such as appendicitis would also have to travel. The end of maternity services at the hospital would mean “there would never again be a Tipperary baby born in Tipperary”, he said.
He accused Minister for Health Mary Harney and the HSE of tying themselves into the “one size fits all” plan for acute hospitals.
Dr Caitríona Crowe, psychiatrist for older people at the hospital said she heard the HSE was moving psychiatric services to Kilkenny on local radio.
The move was done without consultation or an appraisal of alternatives and would subject patients and their relatives to a 35-mile journey to Kilkenny down a “dreadful and winding road”.
She said doctors at the hospital had met Taoiseach Brian Cowen, the Minister of State with responsibility for mental health John Maloney and the head of HSE South Pat Healy, and asked them why they would not agree to a full evaluation of all the options for the best mental health care for the people of south Tipperary.
The meeting was also addressed by racehorse trainer Aidan O’Brien who said the services at Clonmel were equal to any he had seen in the world and by Tipperary hurling captain Eoin Kelly who described the proposed move as “crazy”. Tipperary-born Alice Leahy, founder of the homeless charity trust, said her experience of the HSE was that people were treated as statistics and to be moved around like pieces on a chess board.