Madam, – Can anyone explain why the persistent and dangerous overcrowding that afflicts Irish emergency departments remains unsolved and ignored? This Government moved very swiftly to deal with inadequacies in cancer services in the past two years when clinical errors, which had been highlighted in the press, made it obvious that improvements in service organisation and delivery were essential. Key elements in that improvement process were: a political will to sort it out, an analysis of the service as it was, a redirection of funding to key areas, reorganisation of services and, most importantly, co-ordination of all of this by the cancer tzar, Prof Tom Keane.
Emergency departments in the UK were the victims of overcrowding with in-patient boarders for many years, but the public outcry and the media’s persistent reporting on it was enough to stimulate Tony Blair, the then prime minister, to demand an improvement. What followed was a process that was a mirror image of what we have seen with cancer services here and, under the guidance of their emergency services tzar, Prof George Alberti, the problem was largely solved within two years.
What do we do in Ireland? Yes, we recognise that there is a “National Crisis” (Mary Harney 2006) and we set up a taskforce which produced an excellent document on changes required to improve matters (June 2007), but we fail to appoint a credible co-ordinator/implementor and we ignore all of the recommendations of the Taskforce Report.
Such inertia has not just led to a retention of the status quo, but to a gradual and serious deterioration of the care of patients presenting to emergency departments. There is ample evidence internationally that overcrowding of emergency departments with admitted patients puts them at a significant risk of medical complications and death. In that regard they are no different to the plight suffered by cancer victims in the past. Why then do the HSE, Professor Brendan Drumm and the Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney, continue to obfuscate on this matter? – Yours, etc,