Madam — Your editorial (August 3rd) on the Health Service Executive (HSE) after Prof Drumm steps down made the strange claim that “It must also be acknowledged that the experience of patients is almost uniformly positive once they enter the health system, a point made by a number of contributors to our letters pages recently”.
Uniformly positive? Are we seriously expected to believe that such a troubled system is resulting in “almost uniformly positive” experiences?
It was less than a month ago that The Irish Times reported on a Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) survey (Home News, July 9th) that told a different story: “Some 43 per cent said they felt the healthcare they had received was below expected standards”, with over half of the dissatisfied reporting being too intimidated to complain.
This survey probably more accurately reflects reality than your editorial’s naive and anecdotal assertion. – Yours, etc,