Madam, – The confirmation by the HSE that the proposed new accommodation for cystic fibrosis patients at St Vincent’s hospital will not even receive funding until 2011 at the earliest is contemptible. I have followed the ongoing battle for the patients’ rights as highlighted by cystic fibrosis sufferer Orla Tinsley and the Cystic Fibrosis Association, and like most people had assumed that this new facility with 30 single rooms was already built and due to open.
To hear that the HSE has done its usual and just talked about the planned facility without even cutting a sod of turf or laying a single brick is disgraceful. It has reneged on its moral duty to these young people and their families.
The Minister for Health Mary Harney is a woman not for budging, but I suggest on this occasion she insists this vital Cystic Fibrosis Facility goes ahead.
However, given the urgent requirements of these young patients for more one-bed en suite hospital rooms than the eight allotted, I suggest that extra private rooms in St Vincent’s Private Hospital be immediately assigned as a cystic fibrosis centre. The consultants, nurses and medical staff needed are already in place.
If this needs to go through the National Treatment Purchase Fund, so be it. For private patients displaced from using those rooms at St Vincent’s while the new facility is built, I suggest the use of any spare capacity in either the Blackrock Clinic or the Beacon Clinic.
The health authorities spend a vast amount of money on campaigns to help prevent deaths from alcohol, drugs, dangerous driving, obesity, cancer and smoking, and yet faced with an urgent need to prevent needless early CF deaths and infection they sit on their hands and do nothing.
Enough! They have shamed us with their policies and behaviour. It doesn’t matter how bad our economy is or will be, this is one promise that the HSE and the Minister for Health cannot walk away from unless they have lost their humanity. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Orla Tinsley’s article (Opinion, March 27th) was heart-breaking. Even in these dire economic circumstances no amount of Government rhetoric can justify the about-turn on the promised 30-bed dedicated cystic fibrosis unit. One wonders how ministers can sleep at night after reading such raw truth. – Yours, etc,