Covid 19 Part XXIV-37,063 ROI (1,801 deaths) 12,886 NI (582 deaths) (02/10) Read OP

Makes me laugh the way some people are so enthused with the idea of police or military persons patrolling the streets with sniffer dogs seeking out the infected.

I have to say say some of the experiences my family have been having with the HSE since COVID have been very mixed.

I’ve a very independent elderly relative who is in a stable phase of a type of incurable but treatable cancer, but needs regular infusions of medication, which are being done off site now due to her being in the extremely high risk category for COVID and the hospital has had live cases. She has a weakened immune system and at huge risk if she gets it.

The initial call she had back at the start of the lockdown was completely confusing. They first told her she would have to infuse herself at home. She said she physically couldn’t do that and it subsequently turned out that it was just someone talking out of turn / brainstorming on the phone with her.

There was also a huge delay, where she got no treatment or contact for 7 weeks and she assumed they were “writing her off” and that she was just going to be left to die. We called them and they did have a vague plan in place, but the communication was non existent.

She hasn’t seen a consultant face to face since January and is just going to an off site clinic where they are giving her an infusion of a particular drug (which to be fair to them is very effective and expensive) but she basically hasn’t spoken to anyone from the unit she attends in months.

She has an appointment with the consultant coming up, but they don’t seem to tell her whether that is going to be in person or on the phone. The last time, she almost went into a busy Dublin hospital at peak COVID, as they wrote out to her and then didn’t contact her to tell her it was a phone call until the last minute. They currently can’t tell her if her appointment is in person or by phone a week but over a week ahead of it!?

Then the other thing that has been shocking has been the people who drive her to the appointments, which I realise is a voluntary service and a very useful one, only began to wear masks in the last couple of months. They were turning up without masks and driving an immune suppressed 80+ year old around at peak Covid-19 - she was terrified and wore 3 masks over each other and gloves and used tons of hand sanitiser.

I’m just very unimpressed and she’s afraid to complain as she’s afraid they might just see her as a problem and she would miss out on services, which is probably nonsense but that’s how she feels about it.

The technology or medication access is good but the communication is bizarrely none existent. Even during normal times it was often very poor but you would think that the one thing they could do now is keep in touch with people and reassure them. Instead, it’s actually deteriorated to a level of contact that’s even worse than usual and they’re very very hard to contact.

I’m also finding GP services an impossibility to reach. If you call her doctor almost at any time you get a recorded message asking you to hold the line and you often don’t get anyone at all. You could be calling for hours.

I’ve had exactly the same experience with my own GP and we needed to speak to someone as someone in my household had COVID symptoms. It took 4 hours of redialing and holding to get through to the GP during normal hours!

The test was booked and turned out negative and the HSE sent the results to the GP. We got no direct text from them and the GP had them for >24 hours before contacting us, causing an extra day of totally unnecessary self isolation for the people!

All in all I think the healthcare “system” here is an absolute shambles.

If they could just get the whole interaction with humans bit right it would be hugely beneficial!

Most of the time I feel like I’m trying to deal with multiple people working in a coworker hub rather than a hospital. They don’t seem to interact with or communicate with each other either. Multiple parallel consultants and departments all barely communicating. It’s absolutely infuriating at times and we don’t complain because we know it’s never taken on board and I think most of our expectations are so low that we just put up with this stuff.