Sir, - I am writing in reply to Dr James V. Lucey's comments of January 7th. I welcome any senior member of the psychiatric service in Ireland protesting publicly at the gross under-funding of this section of health care. Psychological and/or psychiatric problems affect the lives of most of our population, either directly or via a family member. It is disgraceful that criticisms and complaints by staff, struggling to provide a quality service within appalling restraints, have had such a poor response from governments over the years.
However, I would like to take issue with Dr Lucey's comment that "many areas of our service limp along with minimum numbers of temporary medical and nursing staff often working alone". Yet again the "whipping boy" of temporary staff has been used to underline his point. If Dr Lucey surveys the psychiatric service in the Eastern Health Board he will note that most of the innovations during the time of opportunity he describes may be attributed to the activities of temporary staff. I would draw his attention to such examples as:
The Swords/Balbriggan home care service.
The Psychiatry of Old Age Service in north Dublin and the initiation of a similar service for south Dublin.
The extension of care into the community for problematic patients discharged from secure hospital facilities.
The development of the Tallaght Community Psychiatric Services.
I could go on. . .These examples of flexible, improved delivery of care were planned, put in place and developed by temporary consultants in psychiatry along with as much of a multidisciplinary team as they could beg, borrow or steal in the circumstances in which they found themselves. The implication that these consultants "limped along", inevitably offering an unchanged, outmoded, unsatisfactory standard of psychiatric care, must be contested.
I cannot comment formally on the temporary nursing situation, but in discussions with colleagues in this discipline, I find their feelings similar to my own. It is time that permanent and temporary (if you can describe in such a way a post held for up to 15 years) consultants in psychiatry made a more united and perhaps public attempt to drive home to the politicians the needs of our service which are vital and urgent. Perhaps then, the Celtic Tiger would have a psychiatric service throughout the country of which it could be proud. - Yours, etc., Dr Serena Condon,
EHB Consultant Psychiatrist (Temp.), St Brendan's Hospital, Dublin 7.