Labour will drive refrom in our health services
Issued : Friday 16 April, 2010
Statement by Phil Prendergast MEP
Colleagues, listening to the speeches today one particular thing stands out.
The Labour Party from its grassroots right up to the highest level wants to tackle the problems in our health service head on.
Labour is willing to drive reform - and it has the ideas and the political will to make it happen.
And one of the most important elements of that reform is to break the cycle of the past 13 years. That has been a cycle in which the provision of health care has been regarded as an administrative matter not a medical one.
It is one in which public accountability has been replaced by political cowardice.
It has been a cycle in which the interests of patients have been relegated and the interests of high-level managers promoted. These managers are not elected, they are not accountable and it seems they are not under Government supervision.
The Health Service Executive was set up five years ago to supposedly make our health service more efficient. It has had the opposite effect.
It has created inefficiency through its ideological obsession with the centralisation of services.
In most cases, it seems the whole service is not being centralised it is simply being diluted at regional level and withdrawn at local level.
Ask the people of County Monaghan. They had their services taken away. Most of them were redirected to what is now - officially - the worst hospital in the country.
The HSE's actions in the North East made outcomes for patients worse not better. But despite this, it is persisting with what it calls 'reconfiguration'. This is supposed to be about best practice in healthcare.
But the evidence suggests it is more about HSE managers saving money for their ministerial masters in exchange for the centralisation of power - around themselves.
That's why the HSE is so often not interested in evidence.
An example of this today, is the way mental health patients in the South East are being treated.
It has been decided that they are to be moved from their treatment centre to facilities that don't have the capacity to accommodate them or are hours away from their home. In some cases the facilities they are to be moved to don't even exist.
This decision was made without consultation with stakeholders, without costing and without an assessment on the impact on patients and the wider community.
And this shows what I think everybody knows about the HSE. It simply does not recognise that patients have individual needs and will never get the best treatment when they are seen as goods to be warehoused.
The Fair Deal for the elderly is another example of an ill thought-out, one-size-fits-all policy. It has got all the hallmarks of HSE decision making. It works in theory, but for many people it does not work in practice.
As is the case with medical cards, it suits administrators and bean counters to bundle the elderly into nursing homes rather than provide the range of services needed.
This is one of the reasons the Fare Deal Scheme is not working properly. It lacks the support of complementary services for independent living.
Community health services are grossly underdeveloped and provision of home care, home help and elderly accommodation units is far from comprehensive.
The failing is, as usual, that it satisfies the needs of administrators but fails to account for the differing circumstances of patients.
Well with Labour in Government things will be different. We will take the most important step of all in fixing our broken health service.
WE WILL TAKE RESPONSIBILITY. WE WILL SHOW THE HSE WHO'S BOSS.
Labour will not hide behind the HSE. We don't allow it in opposition and we won't allow it in Government.
The job of managers will not be to make decisions - it will be to advise ministers having first found out what is best for the patient and what is best for the community.
Ministers are not supposed to be sales representatives of the HSE. They are supposed to be elected representatives of the people.
Labour knows this and Labour will put it right.
