Ard Fheis

Cllr Imelda Munster, Bobby Sands Cumann, Drogheda speaking in support of motion 161.

Published: 1 March, 2008

Everybody in this country agrees the Health Service in Ireland is in crisis. By definition the term crisis is a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger but our health service seems to be in a constant state of crisis. I recently came across a newspaper cutting from the Evening Press almost twenty years ago in it Liam Doran of the Irish Nurses Organisation was complaining of a lack of qualified nurses in the accident and emergency units has nothing changed. In Drogheda we are considered the lucky ones we get to keep our hospital for the moment. A hospital that was built by the Medical Missionaries of Mary back in 1939 because they had the foresight to provide us with much needed medical facilities when there was none. In 1996 the hospital was handed over to the North Eastern Health Board and it now epitomizes everything that is wrong with our public health service.

It is continuously inundated in all departments by patients previously catered for in the Louth County and the Cavan General hospitals that have had emergency and essential services removed by the Health Service Executive. Physio referrals are now given to private practitioners because the in-house dept is operating at full capacity. The out patients dept rooms are now used for over night patients and have become a minefield as patients try and negotiate their way through the overcrowded x-ray and physio depts. Waiting times are so long patients are forced to eat lunch in waiting areas while domestic staff find it increasingly difficult to maintain high standards of cleanliness because they can't get up through packed corridors. Pediatric clinics condensed into afternoon sessions resulting in the overspill of people from the outpatient's dept into accident and emergency area where patients are lying on trollies. Patients are suffer total lack of privacy with a cubicle been seen as a luxury.

And just when we thought it could not get any worse, we heard this week of plans by the government and HSE to close down our Dochas centre. The one stop breast service clinic that was opened in 2004 as a permanent regional unit. This clinic has treated over 100 new breast cancer cases every year and provides an excellent service including mammograms, surgery, aftercare and support. The HSE have not consulted with the dedicated professional care providers working in this unit in the hope that if they leave the official notice of closure until the last minute it will be too late to take action. Let me send a clear message to the government from this conference that the people of Drogheda and the North East will not allow them to play Russian roulette with our health. We will not let our One Stop Breast Service Unit go without a fight..

Yes we in Drogheda are lucky to have kept our hospital but what's the point in having a hospital in name only like others as other parts of the country that have lost their much-needed vital services.

Our health is our wealth. Enough is enough. Sinn Fein's proposals for the creation of an all-Ireland equitable healthcare system is the way forward, not Mary Harney's unrelenting ideological pursuit of a profit led health market in Ireland, which is determined to undermine the public hospital element of the health services which has taken decades of hard wok to build.