Involuntary redundancy 'must be HSE option'

HEALTH:INVOLUNTARY REDUNDANCY must be an option as part of reform of the Health Service Executive (HSE), Fine Gael spokesman Dr James Reilly has told the party conference.

“Fine Gael will seek to retrain those who are no longer required in management or administration roles in frontline services. Voluntary redundancy will be on offer but involuntary redundancies will be and must be an option,” he said.

The HSE was to be the Government’s “great panacea for the health service but they failed to take the hard decisions at the outset in regard to redundancies. Instead they merged 11 health boards and promised every one they could not alone keep their job, but that they wouldn’t have to move job either – an impossible place to begin – enshrining the inefficiencies of the health boards.”

He pointed to the death from cancer of Susie Long, who had to wait seven months for a colonoscopy test. “The Government said they would act, her death would not be in vain. Today the waiting list is nine months.”

He added “We need to arrive at a situation where each employee can answer, what is my job, who do I answer to and who answers to me?” Management needed to answer four questions: “Who made the decision, why was it made, what did it cost and most importantly of all, how did it impact on patient care?”

Dr Reilly said the failure “to bite the bullet” had left a “self-serving system rather than a service for patients.”

Fine Gael spokesman on older people Paul Connaughton said the removal of the automatic entitlement to a medical card for the over-70s was a fiasco that “will be remembered for years to come” from a Government “drunk on power, blinded by arrogance and radically removed from the realities of life”.

Tony O’Donnell, Kildare local election candidate, said the Government had engaged in “an act of careless social vandalism” in removing the card and it was “short-termism of the worst kind”.

Anna Fenlon, a councillor from Wexford, hit out at Minister for Health Mary Harney for a “distinct lack of urgency” in dealing with hospital acquired infections.

“Hospital bugs were a direct cause or contributing cause of death in 16 people who had died in Loughlinstown hospital in seven months, 15 people in Ennis over six months and 22 people in Galway, 11 of them confined to one ward,” she said.

Rory McGinley, a councillor from Crumlin, Dublin, said the new health insurance levy and increased premiums would “force many young families out of the market because health insurance will simply become unaffordable”.