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The Road to Recovery

Issued : Thursday 22 May, 2008

The HSE is not working. When the Government established it more than 3 years ago they set out clear objectives. The new structure was to make the system more responsive to the needs of patients, more accountable, and better value for money.

It has failed to deliver on all 3 counts.

If there was some light at the end of the tunnel, some sense that we were moving in the right direction, perhaps the right thing to do would be to press on with a strategy to achieve the goals set out. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that things are getting better. In fact they are getting worse. What we have is a monolithic system, distanced from the patient, divorced from Ministerial accountability, driven by budgetary concerns rather than patient need. The result is inefficiency, confusion, increased administrative costs, loss of public trust and of staff morale. Swingeing cuts across the service are now proposed to address a budgetary shortfall that is already €95 million overspent for the first 4 months of this year.

The rush to get the HSE up by the politically driven deadline of January 1st, 2005 gave us a cobbled-together structure with weak foundations designed by an architect who refuses to be accountable for the outcome.

Health is too important for this mess to be allowed to continue. Equally, the crisis in health is too urgent to allow anyone the luxury of going back to the drawing board to start again with a blank sheet of paper. Accordingly, the Labour Party is bringing forward a set of six concrete steps to reform the HSE, which, once implemented would have a significant impact on the existing situation, while also facilitating a more radical reform of the way in which health care is delivered in Ireland.

May 2008