THIS YEAR’S annual meeting of the doctors’ trade union, the Irish Medical Organisation, marked the 25th anniversary of its foundation in 1984. Not unexpectedly, it passed a motion of no confidence in the Government’s current health policy. Unusually, however, neither the Minister for Health, Mary Harney, nor any of the Department of Health’s Ministers of State attended.
Unlike other recent professional representative meetings, there was little appetite for strike action by doctors in response to pay cuts and the loss of allowances. Indeed individual hospital consultants indicated they would accept a pay freeze if the money saved went directly to patient care. Instead a palpable concern for patient safety permeated the conference.
Victims of cancer misdiagnosis such as the late Suzie Long, Ann Moriarty and Edel Kelly were emblematic of the health policy failings of Government and the Health Service Executive (HSE), doctors were told. IMO chief executive, George McNeice warned of the dangers of indiscriminate health service rationing in response to fiscal pressures. “It will inevitably lead to a sicker population – now and for many years to come,” he said. And former IMO president Dr Christine O’Malley said the logical implication of the recent Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) report into Ennis hospital was for GPs to refuse to refer patients to the State’s smaller hospitals on safety grounds.
During the no confidence motion debate, Government health policy was described as an abject failure. Doctors were reminded they had a role as independent professionals to tell the truth about the state of the Republic’s health service. And in a direct challenge to Mary Harney, the meeting was told the principle of co-locating private hospitals in the grounds of public institutions was ill conceived and “never going to deliver on the principle of giving care based on medical need as opposed to the ability to pay”.
Away from the rhetoric, it was disappointing to hear that the system failure that led to the premature death of Suzie Long from cancer of the colon still poses a real and present danger to patients. That a person with active bleeding from the gastrointestinal tract could be offered a colonoscopy in a public hospital some six months after being referred by their family doctor can only be described as criminal. Luckily, the individual concerned could afford to access private healthcare and three weeks later he was told he had bowel cancer and was successfully operated on. However, a medical card patient living in our second city could wait up to nine months for this essential, life-saving test at one of Cork’s public hospitals.
Unfortunately, the HSE adopted a top-down approach to health reform when it was established. It is only now beginning the essential process of integration. Meanwhile, patient safety is increasingly compromised in an arbitrary health system where life expectancy is too often predicated on where you live and how much money you earn.