Hospital services around the State are falling apart and in "a shambles", the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) claimed yesterday.
Speaking after an extraordinary general meeting of its members in Dublin where some 350 delegates voted behind closed doors in support of a motion of no confidence in the HSE, association president Dr Mary McCaffrey said the HSE was not listening to consultants' views on how services could be improved.
"The CEO and the HSE board really need a wake-up call to realise that hospital services around the country are falling apart. They are a shambles. We don't have enough beds. Patients are lying on trolleys. Patients are waiting for days on end to get to operating theatres with serious problems in some hospitals," she said.
She added that elective surgery was regularly cancelled.
Giving examples of how services had been run down, she said the day-care unit in Letterkenny General Hospital, which was a flagship unit for the country, was now an overflow medical ward. There was "almost no gynae surgery" taking place in Portlaoise because there were no beds, and patients were waiting four and five days after fracturing hips to get a slot in theatre, she said.
Dr McCaffrey stressed the vote of no confidence in the HSE was not taken as a result of the breakdown in talks with the executive on new contracts for consultants.
"The vote of no confidence was not about the contract negotiations. It was about the state of the health services and how they are being administered and the lack of strategic and operational leadership by the HSE," she said.
"The cytology service in the RCSI is at risk of being shut down because the RCSI cannot get the HSE to the table for fruitful discussions to take over the service. The RCSI processes 40,000 smear tests a year and it will shut down and the smears will be going abroad or wherever if the HSE do not sit down and enter into fruitful discussions with the RCSI," she added.
Dr PJ Breen , chairman of the IHCA's contract negotiating committee, said: "You only have to turn on Joe Duffy any day of the week to realise that the HSE is a dysfunctional organisation. That's known to the man in the street."
Finbarr Fitzpatrick, secretary general of the IHCA, said a number of delegates expressed the view that "all that matters in life now is the trolley count and if you have cancer and you're urgent it's too bad, because you're not on a trolley . . . it's appalling that the health services are coming to that".
The HSE was not commenting last night on the IHCA's vote of no confidence in it.
Meanwhile despite Minister for Health Mary Harney's plans to impose a public only hospital contract on newly hired consultants, in the absence of agreement with the doctors' representative bodies, strike action has been ruled out by the IHCA.