The chief executive of the HSE has defended the health service saying most patients have "a very positive experience" of it.
Brendan Drumm: defended the HSE
"People in the health system are constantly beat up upon. We constantly get this message that the system is a fiasco, that it is a failure. All of the evidence is to the contrary. The evidence shows that for most people who use the system actually have a very positive experience of it," said Prof Drumm said this morning.
During RTÉ's Prime Time Investigates last night, a specialist consultant, Prof John Nolan claimed that patients in Ireland were suffering because the health service was underfunded and fragmented.
However, speaking on RTÉ's Morning Irelandearlier today, Prof Drumm said he believed that the health service was reasonably funded when compared to other nations and stressed that difficulties in the system were not primarily due to financial reasons.
"Unfortunately, a lot of our money is tied up in hospital systems. We have parts of our hospital system where we have 400 doctors with only a 100 admissions a day coming through. We have to move that money," said Prof Drumm.
"I believe that there are resources within the system but I believe that what we're getting from the taxpayer needs to be used more effectively," he added.
Prof Drumm said that it was not possible to compare health expenditure in other countries with Ireland. "Eighty per cent of our money is spent on people aged over 65 year old compared to 20 per cent in Germany. It is irrational maths to compare us with Germany."
While admitting that the HSE had not met its target of having over 90 primary care teams established, Prof Drumm defended the delay in setting up primary care teams. He said that there are currently over 60 teams "up and fully running" and would be 250 teams "up and partially running" by the end of 2009.
The HSE chief said that there was a huge programme of change under way and that it would take time for it to succeed.
"We have to recognise that people working in the system are putting in a huge effort and need to stop beating up on them because people get very demoralised when we do that. We need to encourage people to move to a very different way of working that requires huge change in how we all work," he added.
