GOVERNMENT HEALTH policy was branded a despicable failure by doctors attending the annual conference of the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) in Killarney yesterday.
Speaker after speaker criticised policies which have resulted in young girls being denied the cervical cancer vaccine and older people losing their medical cards. Contributors also criticised the rationalisation of services at smaller hospitals without, in their view, safer alternatives being put in place first.
Delegates ultimately voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion of no confidence in the Government’s health policy.
Proposing the motion Dr Ruairí Hanley, a GP in Louth, asked those attending to consider the fact that there were still hundreds of people on trolleys in hospital emergency departments. He also asked them to think of women whose cancer had been misdiagnosed or not identified in time like the late Suzie Long, Ann Moriarty and Edel Kelly.
He urged delegates to think of people like cystic fibrosis campaigner Orla Tinsley, and of the older people who were now being denied medical cards and the young women denied the lifesaving HPV vaccine, all as a result of the “incompetence” of the Government and its “hellish creation”, the HSE.
“This Government has attempted to undermine and silence us through oppressive legislation and anti-medical propaganda. They fear the existence of an independent, respected profession that tells the truth about the appalling state of our health service,” he said.
“By adopting this motion as policy we have sent them a message . . . on behalf of all those who have suffered, who are suffering, who have died and who will die as a result of their incompetence and their failures.
Dr Larry Fulham, a GP in Portarlington, said that when he went to his surgery last Tuesday morning his secretary told him they had lost “another four this morning”, meaning four more over-70s had wrongly been taken off his practises’ medical card list by the HSE.
The executive believed them to be dead when in fact only one had died.
He pointed out that one of the four had dementia and Parkinson’s disease and therefore could not reply to the HSE’s correspondence. Another had his house demolished last year and was at a new address. And a third could not read or write and was in a nursing home. What upset him, he said, was the HSE did not care about the fact that it was wrongly deleting people from the medical card database.
Dr Matthew Sadlier, who works as a junior doctor in Dublin, said after the economic boom all we had to show for it was the millions spent on external consultants which was of no benefit to patients.
Outgoing IMO president Dr Martin Daly drew attention to the proposed restructure of acute hospital services in the midwest and asked if Limerick Regional Hospital had the capacity to deal with patients who would be referred from Ennis and Nenagh General hospitals. He said he did not believe it had.
He said the motion of no confidence was timely. “I think the Government’s health policy has been an abject failure.”
Meanwhile, the conference issued a plea to the Government to introduce legislation to prohibit below-cost selling of alcohol. Dr Joe Barry, a public health specialist, said children as young as 14 years of age were now ending up in hospital emergency departments.
He indicated there were about 150,000 underage drinkers in the State and this was not helped by the fact that six packs could be obtained for pocket money. “I think what we have in Ireland now is what we call pocket-money prices. I mean you can get a six pack for €6 or €7 and that’s been shown to be particularly attractive to young drinkers . . . and also to people who are alcohol dependent,” he said.
Dr Barry also called on Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey to immediately reduce the drink driving limit to 50mg. He said the Minister had promised to do so but it was important it happen now.