There is too much of a focus on managing budgets in the public health service at the expense of providing proper care for patients, the husband of the late Susie Long told a public meeting in Dublin last night.
Conor MacLiam, whose wife died last October after her bowel cancer diagnosis was delayed because she was a public patient who was put on a lengthy waiting list for a vital colonoscopy, said that for too long the two-tier system in the health service was covered up and public patients died on waiting lists as a result.
He was speaking at a meeting organised by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions as part of the commencement of a new campaign for a decent public health service. A march involving trade unions, patient representative groups and the public, is likely to take place in Dublin in coming weeks to further the campaign's aims.
Mr MacLiam said he wanted to carry on what his wife had started, exposing the two-tier system and campaigning for change. "One of the things that she had hoped to do was to get the trade unions involved. Both of us have very little faith in the establishment parties," he said.
He also said the public health system seemed to be mismanaged and run down. When his wife was a cancer patient in the Mater Hospital the toilet floor was flooded with urine. He wondered where the managers were and suspected they were busy trying to balance the books. "But there is no audit of the human cost," he said.
Furthermore, in the public health services, hospital wards were built and not opened, machines were being bought and not being used, he said.
A large crowd attended the meeting at Liberty Hall, many of them with family members they felt were let down by the public health service. Among them were two brothers of the late Beverly Seville Doyle (39), a mother of three who died in the toilets of the A&E unit at Dublin's Mater Hospital last month after waiting hours for a bed. The cause of her death is as yet unknown, but she had presented at A&E with a pain in her chest and shoulder the day before she died.
Other speakers at the launch of last night's campaign included Janette Byrne of the Patients Together campaign group. She said the announcement of various plans, including a taskforce to improve waiting times in A&E, were just stalling tactics. "Nothing has come of them and at the end of it all then we have cutbacks," she said.
"We need to form a plan for the future. We need to stand up and be heard . . . we need to show them we have had enough and will no longer stay silent. Only then will we see real change," she added.
Kevin Callinan, Impact national secretary, told the meeting the HSE was not delivering, and there was a huge need to seriously question the rampant privatisation agenda that the Government appeared to be pursuing.
Liam Doran, general secretary of the Irish Nurses Organisation (INO), told the gathering they should resist the recent and planned cutbacks which were seriously affecting patient care.
He added that since last September, when a ban on recruitment was announced by the HSE, economists and accountants were running the health service.
"Clinicians on the front line are being ignored and, even more importantly, patients are being ignored," he said.