Madam, - The initiative announced by the Tánaiste to increase the number of acute hospital beds by moving private patients into new independently funded units is to be welcomed. The plan will make room for 1,000 extra public beds at no capital cost to the Exchequer. Public hospitals will be able to generate revenue from leasehold income and by charging the private sector for providing services to the new units.
One of the most important elements of the proposal (which has been largely overlooked) is that these units are to be located on the grounds of existing acute hospitals. Rather than creating a further divide between the public and private systems as Liz McManus claims (Opinion & Analysis, July 20th), this proposal will allow for unprecedented integration and co-operation between the two
By contrast, unregulated development of off-site private hospitals would inevitably result in fragmentation, diminution and dilution of existing specialist services, disjointed and unstructured multidisciplinary care and reduced accessibility of consultants to public patients.
In Waterford, we plan to use this new policy immediately to provide an 85-bed independently funded wing, linked to the main hospital, which will allow the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic services and the expansion of existing ones. The net result will be a badly needed 20 per cent increase in acute bed capacity while maintaining the number of private beds at existing levels.
Rather than being criticised, the Tánaiste should be commended for this innovative and pioneering approach to the delivery of acute hospital care. - Yours, etc,
Dr ROB LANDERS, Chairman, Medical Board, Waterford Regional Hospital.
Madam, - Liz McManus complains that private hospitals will do the work only where they make a profit. Presumably, in her view, this is a bad thing and should not be allowed.
Does the Labour Party extend the same principle to GPs who are virtually all self-employed and who try to cover and, indeed, exceed their costs (ie make a profit for themselves) when providing services to patients?
Under Labour, are GPs too to be banned from earning more income than they incur in costs?
We already have complementary roles for public and private sectors in health. They should both be used in the public interest. - Yours, etc,
FIONA MONGAN, Wasdale Grove, Rathgar, Dublin 6.
Madam, - Dr Asham Istiaq of the Irish Medical Organisation claims that Mary Harney's plan for 1,000 new public beds cannot deal with chronic over-crowding in our hospitals. He recommends instead "a balanced and careful approach" to the expansion of hospital capacity. This sounds like "more of the same" - a slow pace of reform.
With a tripling of health expenditure in recent years, we need more reform and more initiatives such as the Tánaiste's. - Yours, etc,
NICOLA BYRNE, Ard Na Mara, Malahide, Co Dublin.
Madam, - Kevin Myers, ideological storm-trooper of the right, opens a frontal assault on public health care in Ireland with a tirade culminating in the lines: "Get the State out of the health business. Now. Sell our hospitals. The lot. Privatise medicine."
Perhaps he could point to a single example of a sustainable health system based on his simple ideology? The US, for example, provides healthcare for less than 67 per cent (and falling) of its population on that basis and it costs over twice as much per capita (and rising) as our current system.
To put it another way, our current inadequate health system covers a third more people for less than half the cost per head of the privatised model. It is improvement in the standards of healthcare that the people of Ireland are screaming for, not simplistic and expensive ideological claptrap.
Far from ridding us of the self-serving Neanderthal subspecies that runs the current service, his suggestion of privatisation is likely to turn these apparatchiks into overpaid, bejewelled oligarchs. - Yours, etc,
SIMON McGUINNESS, St Joseph's Cottages, Ashtown, Dublin 7.