Madam, - The Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Children, and the Minister for Finance have all recently called for "better co-operation and more work from the consultants throughout the hospitals".
Indeed the Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney, has indicated that no group should be allowed to stand in the way of change in the health service and that "consultants would have to change their working hours because patients often ended up staying in A&E overnight because there was no consultant on duty after 6pm until 8am or 9am the following morning".
She also stated that "more of the same, even a lot more of the same will not work. More beds, more hospitals, more nurses, more consultants, more resources, more pay - on their own - are not the solution".
Those of us who work at the coalface of the health service know that the problem is principally shortage of hospital beds and lack of resources and staff at the coalface. For example there are 14 consultant neurologists in Ireland and the lowest ratio of consultants per head of population in all of the Western world. Appointing more consultant neurologists is one obvious solution to the waiting lists for neurology appointments and the wait in A&E for management of acute stroke.
Change for change's sake will not solve our problems in A&E but informed investment in the health service will. I believe that Ms Harney would be much better informed if she were to join healthcare workers for one day to see the different facets of the health services at first hand than by reading all the various health reports of recent years.
I would like to invite her to join our multi-disciplinary neurology team at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital for a post "on-call" ward round and outpatients over a day.
The Minister will be interested to know she will need to turn up for rounds at 7am and will be finished with outpatients around 9 pm. - Yours, etc,
Dr TIMOTHY LYNCH, Consultant Neurologist, Mater Private Hospital, Dublin 7.