Howlin says HSE needs skilled management

The former Labour Party minister for health Brendan Howlin has said the Health Service Executive (HSE) was not functioning well and that a proper manager should be put in place to run the organisation.

Mr Howlin said yesterday he thought HSE chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm was a very fine person whose heart was in the right place. However, he said, he was not sure whether Prof Drumm had the management skills to shape a very complicated organisation.

On RTÉ's This Week programme, Mr Howlin, who served as minister for health in the 1990s, said that while he believed the current construction of the HSE had not worked in the interest of patients, it would be too disruptive and too difficult to embark on abolishing the organisation and starting again. He said he did not necessarily believe the head of the HSE had to be a physician.

What was needed was "a competent manager to run a complicated delivery system with proper leadership", he said.

Such a manager would forge a sense of common purpose and a belief that a common goal could be achieved.

"So we need to build esteem and morale [ and] assure that everybody [ is] working to a common set of objectives. But the first thing to do is to set those objectives so that everybody is working from the same hymn sheet," he said.

Mr Howlin described Minister for Health Mary Harney as a very fine politician and administrator.

However, he criticised her "obsession" with the hospital co-location initiative which he said was the single most damaging thing being done to the health service at the moment.

Mr Howlin supported the universal insurance model for the delivery of healthcare where the State paid the premium for lower-income groups.

Under such a system, he said, everybody would be on the same list and there would be no distinction between public and private patients.

Mr Howlin said that no organisation, in his experience, had the same level of vested interests as the health service.

He said that in general, everyone in the system - doctors, nurses and consultants - worked extremely hard. However, they all had "empires to defend and protect".

"Managers try to manage but we often put people in managerial positions who have no managerial experience and can't manage," he said.