Health / reaction: The allocation of an extra €700 million to health in 2004 will be totally inadequate to maintain existing levels of service, the Irish Nurses Organisation claimed.
It said the services were already incapable of meeting demand and predicted patients and staff would continue to suffer if the Estimates are adhered to. There will continue to be excessive overcrowding in hospital accident and emergency departments, lengthy waiting times for treatment, and continued cutbacks in community and other health services, it said.
The INO's general secretary, Mr Liam Doran, said the allocation would make it impossible to implement developments promised in the National Health Strategy and the health service reform programme.
"The whole exercise represents a missed opportunity and effectively leaves the health service in a climate of cutbacks, with the improvements detailed in the health strategy left dormant for one more year," he said.
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association expressed dismay at the allocation to health. It too claimed the money provided would not finance the necessary developments promised in the health strategy and the Hanly report. The health strategy promised an extra 3,000 acute hospital beds by 2011 and it also promised no public patient would have to wait longer than three months for treatment by the end of 2004.
The assistant secretary general of the IHCA, Mr Donal Duffy, claimed the 8 per cent increase in non-pay expenditure next year meant, when medical inflation was taken into account, no extra patients would be treated. "The 2001 health strategy has clearly been abandoned in terms of development of our acute hospital system," he said.