Heart Beat: Prof Aidan Halligan, I don't know you but I wish you well. You are to be the chief executive officer of the Health Services Executive (HSE) and I take the liberty of suggesting to you, that for a start you might ask the Minister Mary Harney if Ireland has a public or a private health service or a mixture of both.
You might then enquire if you are responsible for both. Approximately 46 per cent of the population are covered by private health insurance and hitherto apparently they are excluded from the remit of the Minister and the Department of Health. This despite the fact that 100 per cent of the population are entitled to free hospital care. Interestingly when your appointment was announced, the then Minister Micheál Martin was asked was it a good idea to have a doctor in such a post. Perhaps we should have a postman as chief of staff of the Defence Forces, or how about a nun, in charge of the Bank of Ireland. Welcome home to the land where logic always takes second place.
Your reputation precedes you, and all right-thinking health professionals should support you, allowing you to come to grips with the enormous problems in our health service.
There are many concerned and hard working professionals and administrators in the service and their help and advice I am sure will be given willingly. There are also the talking names who up until now have endeavoured to give credibility to a failed system. I have little doubt that as a new broom, you will sweep clean and that you will find your advisers among practical people. The people of Ireland have been increasingly poorly served in the delivery of the health service and I hope you herald a new dawn. Being me, I cannot help suggesting that you endeavour to recruit Gandalf or Harry Potter as your No. 2 as they have special skills that you may require.
Over the past few weeks, I have been revisiting my student days, and recalling our travels through the city, between the various hospitals and UCD in Earlsfort Terrace. The medical school at the terrace is shortly to be no more. But a lot of my memories and those of many graduates, will remain centred there. The school has moved first from its foundation, in 1855, in Cecilia Street. (Temple Bar) to Earlsfort Terrace (1931), and now at last to the magnificent campus at Belfield.
The health sciences block will have schools of medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, and diagnostic imaging (radiology) side by side. The latter two by increasing the number of places available will lessen the necessity for Irish students to train abroad for their primary degree.
Perhaps also in nursing the curriculum could be looked at in such a way as to help provide a solution to the problems whereby 70 per cent of Irish graduate nurses have left the profession within 18 months of qualification. It is clearly not feasible for a State or a university to invest such funding if the return to the populace is so small. We no longer should educate for emigration.
In 2007 the medical school moves to Belfield, and what a campus this is. It is planned and integrated in a way that is almost unique on this side of the Atlantic.
If you have not been there you should go and see for yourself. It is not alone user friendly but welcomes the public, it is well served by public transport. It will have further banks, bars, restaurants, and enhanced sports facilities, including a 50-metre pool. But the purpose remains an academically strong teaching university, with a powerful research background.
Needless to say all of this does not happen without money. Investment is needed here and such, be it from the State, from the corporate sector, from alumni, or from philanthropic individuals, will benefit everyone. Serious money needs to go into our major third-level and postgraduate institutions, and let us not replicate the hospital problems by trying to divide the cake too many ways.
It was with interest therefore that I read about the development of a medical school in Limerick and talk of graduate entry. Graduate entry is a fact of life now in our medical schools, of which we have five. Let us for God's sake expand and develop what we have, concentrating expertise, and utilising economy of scale rather than create another institution competing for scarce funds.
That is enough of the upbeat bit. The real Ireland continued underneath. Five Dublin shops were fined €50 each for selling cigarettes to minors. According to reports they each sold 10 cigarettes to the same 16-year-old girl on October 31st last year. It is noted that "the visits to the shops were carried out under the control of environmental health officers in prescribed test conditions as laid down by the Health Boards".
Prosecutions against the employees accused of the same offences were struck out. A 16-year-old agent provocateur. To what depths have we descended. Serious drug problems, carnage on the roads, endless patients on trolleys, we can't solve these problems, but we get the lads selling fags to the kids. Enough of this, let's all work to get our state back.
• Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon.