Brendan Gleesons A&E outrage

The problem with healthcare is not the lack of funding but the inability of the Health Boards to spend it. for the last number of years they have handed back large sum of money to the department of health because they could not spend it. Apparently it is impossible to get staff. My sister works in intensive care unit and they cannot get staff. That is the problem. Noone wants to work in Irelands health service!

Exactly! Not only has Gleeson sparked this particular debate, he has also set the tone for it. Seriously, some of the suggestions on here appear to be from people who've had their heads buried in the sand for the last decade. The idea that cancelling Patrick's Day travelling by the cabinet will somehow fix the health service is so head scratchingly stupid that I don't know what to do with it.

Money has been thrown at the health service and it hasn't helped. At least, not enough. What is needed is systemic change. Gleeson's comments won't help bring that about. And the idea that he has brought attention to an issue that was previously being ignored is, frankly, a fallacy.

I saw most of Gleeson's rant, and wanted to give him a hug afer it! Over the last fourteen months, three members of my immediate family have been hospitalised in six different hospitals around the country.

Gandalf said in a post that he thinks people are possibly dying as a result of our health system. I have been stating this possibility for nearly a year. My youngest sister spent three weeks in the neurosurgical intensive care in Beaumont Hospital last year. Admittedly, the nursing staff there were excellent, not only in their care of my sister, but also in their sympathy and compassion to us and te other families. But in my three weeks there, from observation and talking to other families, a number of frightning realities hit me.

My sister was in the only centre of neurosurgery in Ireland. It has less than twenty beds. Anybody who has a brain haemorrhage or a brain injury in a road accident needs to be in this ward to ensure theri chances of survival. The staff have to refuse to take transfers of patients they don't think they can help because they do not have the resources to treat a patient who may die. One gentleman I spoke to had been waiting three weeks to have his wife transferred to Beaumont. We know for a medical fact that my sister would have died if she'd had to wait that long for a bed. So how many others are dying, in the process of waiting?

Rehabilitation options for these patients are nearly as bad. There is a minimum of a six month waiting lit to get into the National Rehabilitation Hospital, and again they are forced to be very selctive in whom they admit because their resources are so scarce. From what I saw, there's approx 100 beds in the NRH, and they admit all ages including small children. My twenty year old sister was on a ward which included pensioners recovering a stroke. And she was very, very lucky to get that bed, despite the drawbacks.

I could continue ranting but I won't. All I can say is that no matter what anyone may say of the economy, if you don't think there'a serious problem in our health service, you haven't seen much of it. It's not just A+E. My sister in Donegal had serious complications with the delivery of both her children (her eldest is nearly 4), yet there's a brand new maternity ward in Leterkenny General ready since she was expecting her first child and still not open. It's everywhere.

Edited just to add, that the staff are the only positive thing to the system. The dedication of some of the nurses we met was unbelievable. It's certainly not a job I could stomach.

There's nothing wrong with adding a famous voice to an ever growing debate, albeit a debate from only the side of the victims.......

The health system here is a mess, I feel so sorry for the people who work in it, they must get so frustrated - I know I do. There has been more and more money put into the health system over the last number of years, but as has been learnt by this mistake in other countries this doesn't make any difference unless the system is better organised so that the money actually makes a difference. As long as Harney is in charge of this it's going to get worse and worse, with no answers coming over anything, I've actually heard people texting radio stations this week claiming she's an easy target because she's making radical changes to the system, I've never heard such BS in all my life, she's made changes alright, and I probably would have given her a bit longer until she came out and said she can't be held responsible for everything that happens in the health system - must be great to suddenly decide that you no longer means you have resposibility for your actions, is she not getting paid a lot of money for exactly that responsibility, makes me sick, and then to tell people that she doesn't answer questions they should all be put to the Health Executive (which clearly doesn't have a clue and under it's setup doesn't need to take the resposibility to answer any questions) it's madness.
We are just allowing the people at the top to take no responsibility leaving the problems to come back on the rank and file, nurses and doctors, putting even more pressure on an overworked under resourced labourforce, all we need to be told at this stage is that we can't get sick because there won't be anybody there to help us - unless we go to certain private clinics.......

It took them nearly ten years of government to come up with 'more beds' as a solution?! Why did they spend so much money in the past on reports, commissions, etc if they were eventually just going to listen to common sense?