The Mary Harney Thread

She is the physical representation of massive failure.

Wagon wrote: »

She is the physical representation of massive failure.

Structural failure that is

She's a blimp but there's something about those eyes....

The poll is biased toward option 3. Who doesn't fear that?

Any pics? Actually don't. She is a wreck.

sprinklesspanky wrote: »

Here's a mental image for you

ROFLCOPTER!

FlutterinBantam wrote: »

What useless regulations and policies do we refer to poster??

How the feck do I know!? I just saw a thread about Mary Harney and decided to blow hot air! Nah, seriously though, I don't know the specific policies. But I do see the shortage of beds in hospitals, high prices for medicine and dodgy means testing for medical cards (not the over 70s ****, people who are still young with families). I also notice the planned closure of head shops she put forwards (nothing to do with her department) to distract from other issues. I know what your saying, there's a lot of retards in the health service and I agree completely. It is however a ministers job to clean that up as well as the service itself.

I think she is a swell gal.

It's very easy to defend Harney by saying that people who work in the HSE are lazy, self-interested and resistant to change.

I've worked in a lot of jobs, both in the eprivate and public sector, and I don't think the HSE is any worse than anywhere else across the board.

Sure, there's old bags sitting in offices doing not a lot in some parts of the service. But that's seen in a lot of jobs. Let's face it, a lot of people are on boards.ie in their work time. A lot of people aren't working at maximum efficiency.

But the difference int he HSE is that there are people within that service working up to three times the hours every week that the critics work. This is often without sleep or breaks. There are people wokring their arses off against huge waves of resistance. Conditions are so bad that research indicates public health workers die younger than other similarly qualified workers.

I would suggest the critics spend some time with the following people:

The junior doctor (when I say junior, I mean anything up to 13 years post grad) working a 72 hour shift, with maybe an hour or 2 of sleep.

The nurse looking after all the needs of 8 immobile patients on her own on a geriatrics ward because of poor staffing.

The junior radiographer working in the busy city centre hospital, who's responsible for x-raying every patient in A+E who needs one, aswell as any critically ill patients on the ward, while getting dogs abuse off every 2nd person because there's a wait involved.

The young girls working in medical records. They're climbing big ladders to get huge volumes of notes from massively high shelves, with feck all health and safety concern for them. There's a few people working in these departments, and they're responsible for having all the notes for every patient ready for their admission, aswell as everyone who comes into A+E as they arrive. these girls get run ragged.

The people working on the desks in the appointments/admission section. Qeues halfway down the corridor. people going crazy because you can't give them appointment for a year. Others going crazy because you can't hurry the queue along, as your booking software was designed in 1985.

I could go on..the security guys in A+E, the overworked paramedics, the lab staff working round the clock to analyse urgent blood tests.

NONE of the above are resistant to change that would be benficial to the running of the hospital. They're all resistant to the type of change that harney espouses....ie politically motivated crap, that serves only to make her look good.

The junior docs are spending 60% of their time on non-patient duties, such as searching for xrays in boxes in outdated depratments, trying to look up blood test results in wards with not enough computers. Filling out (from what I can remember) about 30-40 forms per day, that should all be done in 10 minutes on a computerised system.

The nurses have to fill out a ream of paperwork to just talk to a patient's family.

The service is criminally mismanaged.

I can give many examples of the attempted "change", that the selfish "interest groups" objected tobut I don't want this to run on too long, and people wouldn't believe me.