Councillors from across the region united to demand a meeting with all senior HSE managers from the Saolta hospital group to account for the increased waiting lists a decade on from the replacement of the health boards.
Many councillors at this week’s HSE West Regional Health Forum meeting lamented the state of the health system across the western seaboard in the face of multiple high-profile managers whom successive ministers held up as the potential saviours.
Several members pointed to the single public MRI machine operating in University Hospital Galway (UHG) – a ‘Centre of Excellence’ for the region – as evidence that the system was just not fit for purpose.
Fine Gael councillor Padraig Conneely said during his recent stay at UHG, he met a Donegal woman and her daughter who discovered the MRI scanner was out of action when they arrived. Her daughter took up a bed for a week while the machine was being fixed; the mother, was forced to spend €60 a night in a B&B.
“What management would stand over a system like that in the commercial sector. They wouldn’t get any bonus or payout. That widowed mother was distraught. I got her a B&B myself for €40 a night. It’s scandalous what’s going on,” he fumed.
The HSE was set up in 2005 when the old health boards were dissolved as they were seen as too parochial. Cllr Conneely and Cllr Catherine Connolly (Ind) were both on the first health forum in 2006, but in that period had seen all too little progress.
Cllr Connolly pointed to the growing waiting lists, increasing use of agency staff increasing and ever more public money going to private institutions to pay for procedures that could not be carried out within a reasonable timeframe in the public hospitals.
In relation to a second motion, in which she called on the minister for health to adequately fund the public health service, Cllr Connolly said there would soon be a “public purse onslaught” to fund increasing numbers of patients to seek treatment overseas.
Cllr Terry O’Flaherty (Ind) said she knew of one patient who received a text from the HSE offering to pay transport and the cost of an appointment in a private Dublin hospital due to the waiting times locally.
The only MRI scanner in UHG should be operating past 5pm and at weekends to cut waiting lists, Cllr Mary Hoade (FF) insisted.
Chief Officer for Galway, Mayo and Roscommon Community Services, Tony Canavan, said clearly there were difficulties in the system.
“But it’s important if we’re looking at this openly, we’re also open to the possibility that good things have happened. In the A&E – lots and lots of people go through the A&E, and their experience is good, they’re not the kind of people who complain to you,” he insisted.
Saolta group CEO Maurice Power said there was no difficulty arranging a special meeting with senior management but it could prove tricky to get them all to come at the same time. It would likely happen next March.
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