Reconfiguration or privatisation? Mass Closing of Public Hospitals Planned!

national | anti-capitalism | press release Thursday June 11, 2009 08:41 by Marie O Connor - Health Services Action Group

Cuts and closures in the guise of health ‘reform’

Implementing the latest HSE/Teamwork Report will effectively terminate four of the South's acute public hospitals. The Government is looking to a US hospital chain (UPMC) to open a co-located for profit hospital to replace the closed public hospital beds.

For further details, please contact Peadar McMahon on 086 044 33 00;
Dr Tom Nolan on 087 25 13 535; or Marie O’Connor on 086 81 80 254.

FAILTE ROIMH AGALLAIMH AS GAEILGE

Cuts and closures in the guise of health ‘reform’

Health groups have reacted angrily to the threatened closure of
hospital services in the South.

Peadar McMahon, Acting Chair of the Health Services Action Group,
said: ‘The launch of yet another HSE/Teamwork Report on public
hospital services in the South signals a new round of cuts and
closures in the guise of health service “reform”’.

Four acute public hospitals in the Southern region are threatened with
closure as inpatient facilities, two in Cork City, and two serving
large rural populations in North and West Cork.

‘The publication of a Teamwork Report in a region should strike fear
into citizens, communities, commuters and, indeed, all who use the
roads in that region’ said Peadar McMahon.

‘In the North-East, for example, Teamwork recommended the effective
closure of the region’s five acute public hospitals.’

‘In the Mid-West, Teamwork again advocated the effective closure of
three acute public hospitals in Ennis, Nenagh and St John’s.’

‘In the South-East, the future of four acute public hospitals
(Clonmel, Cashel, Wexford and Kilkenny) must be a matter of
considerable doubt.’

‘Now, in the South, Teamwork has completed its hat trick by preparing
the ground for the effective closure of all of the region’s acute
public hospitals bar one’.

Dr Tom Nolan, a general practitioner in Kilrush, Co Clare, said: ‘The
Teamwork template originated in the Hanly Report: one acute public
hospital in the entire region staffed 24/7 by consultants, with one
intensive care unit and one A&E unit for the whole population. The
rest will be nurse-led, nine to five day care ancillaries.’

‘But no amount of diagnostics, drugs and day surgery can make up for
bed closures and staff cuts’, he added.

While public hospital services are being pruned in Dublin, in
hospitals such as St Luke’s, Crumlin, Temple St and James Connolly
Memorial, all acute inpatient services in the South, in Bantry,
Mallow, the Mercy and the South Infirmary Hospitals will soon be
terminated.

‘But road traffic accidents are 24/7, not 9 to 5’, said Dr Nolan.

‘An office hours casualty unit is not an adequate service. This slash
and burn approach to public hospital services must end.’

Professor John Higgins has publicly admitted that there is no
additional money for HSE’s so-called reconfiguration project, and that
implementing it largely depends on eliminating “waste”.

‘But in a public hospital system with a bed occupancy often in excess
of 100 per cent, where is the waste that will provide for the primary
care teams, the home care packages, the non-acute, hospice and
psychiatric beds and the daycare diagnostics?’ HSAG PRO Marie O Connor
asked.

‘The Government’s privatisation agenda has now been laid bare. HSE is
looking to a private for profit co-located hospital to take the place
of the public hospital beds it plans to close.’

Dismissing it as a ‘a paper hospital’, Marie O’Connor said the
planned co-located hospital had not even got full planning
permission. ‘Moreover, its backers are unlikely to get funding for
their enterprise from banks that are teetering on the edge of
bankruptcy.’

‘This shift away from public provision of health services to private
for profit health care represents another step in the Americanisation
of our health service,’ she concluded.

‘As a society, we are hurtling, like lemmings, towards the cliff of a
US-style system of care.’

ENDS
For further details, please contact Peadar McMahon on 086 044 33 00;
Dr Tom Nolan on 087 2513535 or Marie O’Connor on 086 81 80 254.

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Marie O'Connor Press and Public Relations Officer Health Services Action Group
Author: 'EMERGENCY: Irish hospitals in chaos' 086 81 80 254