THE HEALTH Service Executive has ended a support service for patients who self-harm in Cavan and Monaghan in order to cut costs, Sinn Féin has said.
The party's health spokesman Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin said the HSE had decided in April to discontinue the role of specialist liaison nurse, which was established in the region in 2006 to assist those who had presented at hospitals after self-harming. He said health officials had characterised the decision as a "pause" to facilitate a review of the service.
"It is disgraceful that such a vital service has been discontinued. It is totally disingenuous for the HSE to claim that the service is being 'paused' for the purposes of a review. If the service was working well - and it clearly was - then it should have been left in place and only altered if a review found that change was necessary for the better care of patients," Mr Ó Caoláin said.
"It is obvious that the motivation for axing this service is not the needs of patients or any real review of the effectiveness of services provided. Instead, it is yet another HSE cost-cutting exercise designed to trim budgets, regardless of the impact on patients."
It is understood that the National Office for Suicide Prevention is a part-funder of the specialist liaison nurse position, and has provided the HSE North East with some funding for the appointments of two nurses to cover Cavan and Monaghan.
Mr Ó Caoláin said that since February the HSE North East has only been accepting urgent or emergency child and adolescent psychiatric referrals from GPs in Cavan and Monaghan.
A spokesman for the HSE said it was still seeking to establish the circumstances of the Cavan Monaghan case, but stressed that the organisation had put in place specialist psychiatric nurses for patients who self-harm in most of the country's acute hospitals.
