The campaign for a Real Public Health Service held a successful public meeting in Blanchardstown in response to the HSE’s plans to cut €3 million from the James Connolly Memorial Hospital’s budget.

These cuts will leave the hospital with the same level of funding it had in 2006.

A consultant from James Connolly Hospital, Dr Eamon Leen, and the hospitals Irish Nurses Organisation representative Denise Hartigan addressed the meeting along with Joe Higgins and Councillor Ruth Coppinger of the Socialist Party.

The €3 million cutbacks will lead to the curtailing of many vital services. Denise Hartigan reported to the meeting that there has been an embargo on recruitment of new workers, leaving many wards and departments seriously short staffed. Speakers from the floor also outlined how proposed car parking charges would hit family and friends of the sick in the pocket.

Reports were also given of how the crucial hospital home visits have been cutback. Other cuts among the HSE’s plans include a reduction in the opening times for the out patient department and the privatisation of many beds in the hospital.

The hospital has also been ear marked for co-location, i.e. a private for profit hospital is to be built at great expense to the taxpayer on the grounds of James Connolly Memorial Hospital.

Joe Higgins reminded the meeting that these latest cuts are taking place exactly 20 years since the community and the hospital workers successfully defeated the then government’s plans to downgrade the hospital.

Joe Higgins made the point that a similar campaign of people power is needed now to defeat the government’s current cuts and privatisation agenda.

It was agreed at the meeting to establish a campaign to oppose the cuts and to defend the services provided by the James Connolly hospital.

Quest Diagnostics made headlines last month when it was revealed that despite having paid up to $40 million in various fraud settlements in the US over the last decade they received the HSE contract for laboratory services for the national cervical cancer screening programme. The government has refused to say whether or not they or the HSE were aware of Quest’s record.

This is no one off. It has since come to light that the HSE has again put penny pinching before the lives and health of people by awarding another contract to a company with a crooked past.
Fresenius already operate a dialysis centre in Dublin on behalf of the HSE. They are a big German multinational company and they have just been given similar contracts to run centres in Limerick and Kilkenny. They essentially profit from public hospitals not being able to cope with the amount of dialysis patients on their books and receive the “overflow”. Thus in Dublin they strategically built their facility near Beaumount Hospital.

This company have paid fines amounting to $500 million for various offences including issuing false claims for work not done and paying kickbacks to those who have awarded them contracts. One settlement alone amounted to $385 million the biggest ever of its kind in the US.
The HSE will not confirm whether or not the people who awarded the contract looked into Fresnius’s background but the company when questioned by an Irish Independent journalist freely admitted that they concealed these facts from the HSE.

Can there be any starker lesson of what results from for-profit health care? By outsourcing cervical smears to Quest the HSE is giving up control of quality and safety standards that will affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of women to a company whose only interest is making a profit!

On 10 May between 4-5,000 protested in Monaghan town to save their local hospital. The HSE plan to close all Monaghan hospital emergency facilities and all acute inpatient services by November. The demonstration marks a determined effort by the Community Alliance campaign to save the hospital. 

Community Alliance Chairperson Peadar McMahon says if Monaghan loses its hospital, other hospital closures will follow “as night follows day”. “As the OECD confirmed last week, the North East is the pilot for the government's national hospital plan - the elimination of over 40 acute inpatient facilities.  The Hanly report outlines a strategy for what they call a process of modernisation and centralistation.  They call it modernisation and say that patients can be diverted to Drogheda and Cavan, yet there isn't even adequate public transport to connect Monaghan and Cavan and Drogheda.  There is no extra money budgeted to improve services at Drogheda and Cavan to cater for the additional patients.

The overall HSE plan for the North east is that in addition to Monaghan, Drogheda, Dundalk and Navan general hospitals will lose their inpatient facilities as the government bids to centralise facilities. Yet Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern  recently said that there was not “one red cent” for building a new regional general hospital. 

Joe Higgins spoke at the demonstration and his call for a national campaign to oppose the government’s health cuts and the need for a real public health service were well received.

A recent Primetime documentary on RTE exposed yet another dimension to the crisis in healthcare. The Socialist spoke to a social worker about his assessment of the programme and the issues it raised.

“The programme told it as it is. There have been all sorts of contributory factors that got us here. Our cities have experienced a population explosion and a corresponding increase in caseloads but no extra resources have been put in. The new estates that have been built are generally bereft of any social support infrastructure leaving families and children particularly vulnerable if they are surviving on a low income.

“What we do now can best be described as fire fighting. In any team three to four “grade 1” emergency cases could drop on our laps requiring immediate attention. These cases require long-term intervention. If you are trying to establish that a child is being neglected it takes more than a one off visit to come to a conclusion to recommend a course of action that could include a child being taken into care.

“The HSE’s response that all children at risk are getting the response they need from the Community Care teams and that any view to the contrary from the people on the ground is essentially a ploy to secure more resources only demonstrates their disconnect from reality. It holds as much truth as their claims that there is no recruitment embargo. There has been something of a witch-hunt conducted by senior management since the documentary as the contributions from social workers were anonymous.

“At its best social work should be preventative in character and the right resources and attention can make a big difference especially with children. Telling a family whose child, who may have severe behavioral or emotional problems, that they have to wait eight months for psychological treatment is devastating for the parents. Similar scenarios occur when a child has an addiction problem. During the long waiting time for treatment the child’s problems get worse and ultimately harder to treat.

“Social work could be a real investment by society as every proper intervention made early in the life of people at risk pays off in the long run if it keeps children out of trouble with the law, keeps them in school etc.

“We cannot lose sight however of why these problems arise to begin with. They are symptoms of society. Issues like inflation, the wealth gap and suburbs left without services, especially in the context of an oncoming recession, mean that case loads will increase and all the social workers in the world cannot deal with the fallout. Social work has a role to play but fundamental societal change is the response posed by these problems.”