Consultant criticizes health system ‘dangerous, reckless and unsustainable’

The scale of the Covid-19 pandemic would not have been so severe if long-standing health care problems had not been addressed for a long time: The current problems facing the health system are “dangerous, reckless and unsustainable” .

Those were some of the strident criticisms leveled by the president of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA), Professor Alan Irvine, when addressing their annual conference this morning.

In front of attendees such as Health Minister Stephen Donnelly and HSE CEO Paul Reid, Irvine said the virus has shown long-standing problems in Irish healthcare.

“It has brought our society to the brink. Our people are feeling its effects on a personal, social, financial and psychological level.

“It has made us clearly see the codependency that exists between a sustainable economy and a well-resourced healthcare system, a codependency that perhaps we have not really appreciated until now.

“Our leaders are making unenviable decisions and face decisions that involve increasing trade-offs, particularly between life and livelihoods.

I strongly believe that these options would never have emerged, at least on such a scale, if we had invested enough in our health services over time.

“Over and over again, the problems that we and others highlighted in our healthcare system were far reaching,” he said.

As a result, our health service has been cornered and the consequences are hitting people hard, he said.

“Right now, the available bed capacity is 2%. That’s dangerous.

Right now, 840,000 people are waiting for attention. That is reckless. At this time, 500 consultant positions remain vacant. That is unsustainable.

However, as unenviable options pile up, the government continues to avoid options that would avoid much of the pain, Irvine said.

“Evade decisions and delivery schedules on capacity foundations such as: elective hospitals and trauma strategy; ICU, acute and step-down beds; consultant salary parity; and localized decision making, ”he said.

Report after report has found that the key to capacity is people and beds, but we continue to avoid the obvious remedies, he said.

“And all this at a time when, at € 600 million, we are spending more than ever on a winter plan, while borrowing € 20 billion and counting to shore up much of our social, cultural and business life.”

Capacity, decentralized decision making and advance planning are the solutions to three core challenges that consultants face in patient care, he said.

“If there are better ways to tackle these and other problems, we will be happy to commit to developing them because now is the time to find solutions. Much of what we took for granted or accepted as the way things are done has been changed by Covid-19.

“The failure of the system to connect the dots between an under-resourced healthcare system, the lack of effective planning, and the risk this poses to livelihoods has hit hard.”