Heart Beat: St Martin's Summer - As swallows turning backwards / When half-way o'er the sea / At one words trumpet summons / They came again to me / The hopes I had forgotten / Came back again to me - (R.L. Stevenson)
I think we are having a St Martin's summer. It is now mid-September and I am writing this out of doors. It is full tide and I have just been swimming. I vaguely recall being told that it is very healthy to swim in September and that in these climes the water temperature is at its highest.
I suppose swimming at any time is good for you, and certainly swimming in the open sea leaves me with a feeling of wellbeing and contentment. The leaves are turning colour quite quickly now and the hedgerows are literally covered with blackberries, unlimited vitamin C for the taking, no adulteration, no additives.
However, I must return from my autumnal reverie; reluctantly I might add. I have just read Minister Brian Lenihan's reply to the article I wrote on Ms Harney's hospital plan.
I welcome his statement that debate and discussion are sought because it is indeed a substantial new initiative. I have not read the document in detail from the Department of Health website, so I will refrain from detailed comment at this time.
I am an old-fashioned democrat. I would like this debated in Dáil Éireann, and widely and intensively discussed among the users and providers of the service. Announcing such a seminal plan at a news conference in July is hardly sufficient. Then, I suppose you folk are rather good at press conferences, vide the health strategy, the patients' charter, the primary care strategy, etc, etc.
Trouble is you get the publicity and with a little spin the people are fooled into thinking something is actually happening. I must confess to a certain feeling of foreboding when I realise that much of the input derives from the Department of Health. I am not alone in thinking that it bears prime responsibility for the situation as it exists today.
Sadly, however, there appears to be more than a grain of truth in the saga of the golden computer. The best guess ranges somewhere between €200 and €500 million; this from an initial postulated cost of €8.8 million in 1998. Black hole, how are you? Not one patient benefits from this, nor any doctor, nurse or paramedic. This bids fair to be the greatest scandal to afflict our terminally ill health service.
I notice also that Prof Brendan Drumm at his first press conference gives a more realistic time frame for improvements in the A&E service to become discernible to the naked eye.
He postulates that improvements in primary care and community services for the elderly need to be improved to reduce pressure on A&E departments. The report then includes the phrase "Although the Government had developed a strategy to improve primary care, Ms Harney had indicated that there wasn't enough funding to implement it." The attribution of this statement is unclear, the consequence, however, is obvious. Think what could have been done with the money alleged to have been spent on this white elephantine computer.
Might I make a little plea here? If this computer is to be scrapped or mothballed, could it be stored with the electronic voting machines, Stadium Ireland, Digital Web, etc in a special museum devoted to costly follies.
Maybe such a museum could also store the mountains of paperwork in EU documents being translated into Irish, through the foresight of Minister Eamon O'Cuiv. Doubtless anybody reading this could think of a few more exhibits to display. I would suggest that admission might be free, no taint of rip-off Ireland here.
I heard Minister Brennan on Questions & Answers being forthrightly honest in acknowledging that Eddie Hobbs had raised questions that the Government needed to address. In reply to a question on Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT), he said this kind of money and taxation was necessary to run social programmes. I think, Minister, that everybody can see and accept that.
I think, Minister, that what they cannot accept is the squandering of their money on advisers, spin doctors, useless apparatchiks and political cronies. They cannot accept the museum of wasteful useless faded dreams. They cannot accept either the lack of basic accountability in the completion of more worthwhile infrastructure.
To conclude with further reference to Prof Drumm. He states that there is significant demoralisation among health service staff. About this I get letters, calls and e-mails every day.
Do we all think that it will lift morale to hand large parts of the service to the entrepreneurs now flocking around to invest, not for the national good but for profit? If we so think, let us dream on. Is it too late for idealism in this most human of services?
But be my hopes rewarded / Or be they but in vain / I have dreamed a golden vision / I have gathered in the grain / I have dreamed a golden vision / I have not lived in vain. - (Stevenson)
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon