Madam, - Is there any chance that some senior decision-maker in the Department of Finance will finally wake up to the folly of the current co-located hospital plan as exposed so succinctly in your paper this past week by doctors Maurice Neligan and Gerry Burke? I have long since given up on the idea that either the HSE or Department of Health has personnel capable of such independent thought.
It is obvious that there is already over-capacity in the private hospital market and that health insurance is increasingly going to spiral out of affordability for large sections of the community. Unless the Government secretly intends to hive off large parts of the public hospital service to for-profit organisations with all the attendant implications, these new co-located hospitals are doomed to be under-used white elephants. If, however, this is the Government's plan, can we at least have the opportunity to debate whether this "Boston-type" health service is want we want?
As a general practitioner, the extreme irony is that if the same tax breaks that these hospitals will enjoy were available to me and my colleagues around the country to build comprehensive primary care centres, we could guarantee far bigger improvements to the country's health service than new hospitals could ever hope to achieve.
Unfortunately, as always, the Cinderella service that is general practice (doing most of the work and receiving little of the official credit) is yet again being ignored in favour of a hospital system which, even if properly organised and run, would only ever deal with a tiny minority of the people who appear every day seeking healthcare.
If current plans continue, we are going to end up with gross over-capacity in the private hospital system, a chronically weakened public hospital system and a badly underdeveloped primary care service. You really couldn't make it up if you tried. - Yours, etc,
Dr SHANE CORR,
Carrickmacross,
Co Monaghan.