(This article first appeared in the Andersonstown News)
Where does health come on your list of priorities? Easiest question of 2016, you say: “At the top”. Even being mildly off-colour acts like a hand-brake on your life: the job’s harder, leisure time is a trial, parents snap at children, parents snap at each other. And of course if a child’s health is at risk, parents will do just about anything to speed recovery.
Which makes news clips and figures from the south about hospitals in the twenty-six counties truly shocking. Trolleys parked end-to-end in corridors, men and women patients grouped together, noise and zero privacy. And of course interminable waiting times before people are treated.
That’s the dramatic end. At the more everyday end, if you visit your local GP in the south, it’ll set you back €60. If s/he gives you a prescription, you can add at least another €10 to that. Get a tooth filled and you’re waving goodbye to €60; get braces fitted and you’re into thousands. No wonder so many people in the south are ‘dental tourists’, travelling to the north or even as far away as Hungary, in search of cheaper treatment.
Does medical provision in the south have to be that way? Of course not. Consider Cuba. That small country has 627 doctors and 94 dentists per 100,000 people; in contrast, the US has 225 doctors and 54 dentists per 100,000 people. Most people would consider Cuba an impoverished country, the US perhaps the wealthiest country in the world. Even though Cuba has been buffeted by US restrictions and embargoes for the past 60 years, it still manages to deliver high quality health care for all its citizens.
It all comes down to what a country puts first. The south of Ireland has some 270 doctors per 100,000 people – like the US, miles behind Cuba. Even during the Celtic Tiger years, southern politicians made no serious attempt to provide a proper health service for all.
Would public opinion have supported them if they had? Of course. It’s hard to imagine even a single man or woman in the south who wouldn’t favour a public health system that dealt with all of the children of the twenty-six counties equally.
Sinn Féin has produced a blueprint for such universal health care, free at the point of delivery. How would they pay for it? “The Department of Finance tells us there is an additional €8.6billion available for spending or additional tax reliefs over the next five years. Our additional €3.3billion will come from that ‘fiscal space’.” The party has produced an 84-page Better4Health document which details how that money would be used to produce a national health service.
The standard response among southern politicians from other parties is to dismiss such plans as fantasy economics. Their rejection would carry more credence if they showed that they had read Sinn Féin’s proposals and were addressing the plans contained in it. But I suppose name-calling is considerably easier than a serious critique.
With a southern election within the next few months, now seems an ideal time for voters in the south to look through the Sinn Féin document and see for themselves whether it makes financial sense. If you’re a grown-up politician, you focus on policies, not juvenile put-downs. And name-calling, of course, is always a sure sign that you’ve lost the argument.
Can’t disagree with that.
Do we make too much of a fetish of the genius of Doctors? We restrict the numbers trained and then throw money at them to stop them heading off to Australia and New Zealand. In an economy with more graduates than ever maybe we should be training a lot more doctors and paying them a bit less. Salaries in parallel professions with more market exposure (pharmacy, optometry) have certainly dropped.
“then throw money at them to stop them heading off to Australia and New Zealand”. Um, maybe check what junior doctors make, their years of training and their work hours, BYC. I promise you, they’re not having to invest in raincoats to stop the shower of money.
Down here in the Discomfort Zone of the Free Southern Stateen (sic) , Esteemed Blogmeister, our Department of Health (sic) is a chronic butt of black humour and commonly referred to as ‘Angola’
The origin of the sobriquet is usually ascribed to a throwaway comment by the much ridiculed Brian ‘Biffo’ Cowen, made some time after leaving the post of Minister: ‘just when you’ve cleared one land mine another goes off’.
Although not without his political FFaults (what Fianna Failure is?) nonetheless one suspects Biffo’s heart was in the right place. Certainly, if one is to go by a Wikileaks reference to a dispatch sent back to Washington by the then Uncle Sambassor and his staff in Dublin ‘that Biffo might well be an appropriate nickname as he was not much concerned about his public image’.
Which, in Perkie’s list of scheduled offences, is not exactly at the hanging end of the spectrum. His tongue was certainly in the right place as Biffo was one of the mouthful of FSS Ministers who could communicate with equal facility in the First and Second Languages of the stateen. All others, by definition, are linguistic subvERSEives.
Biffo also has a sense of humour. A trait not to be sneezed at in Hawkins House, the HQ of the Health Department (sic) in Dublin, that monument in glass, metal and reinforced cynicism to modern architectural brutalism. For which folly, for which operating theatre of trolleys that emporium of laughter, The Theatre Royal, was demolished to make way.
On first hearing mention of Angola one mistakenly thought this was a take on the Island of Gola / Oilean Ghabhala off the coast of Dun na nGall. A mistake perhaps explained by consideration of the cormorants, shags, razorbills, guillemots, gannets, eider ducks, oystercatchers and terns employed to shriek and scavange there.
And that’s just the high maintenance media section especially appointed from the Real World by successive Ministers of Health (sic) who ‘are concerned about their public image’.
The current incumbent comes to mind – Dr. Leo Varadkar whose concern is not in doubt. And whose exotic surname name is explained, of course, by his Indian heritage. His Daddy, indeed, was a doctor before him who practiced medicine in his native continent where, as the WHO itself has confirmed, such dreaded diseases as beriberi and dysentery have been cleared by just one jab in the Punjab.
Dr. Leo’s most spectacular achievement thus far has been that sine qua non of all self-respecting Ministers of Health (sic), i.e., The Clearing of the Air. It famously happened on the prestigious wireless progamme on RTE with Sunday morning coming down: The Mimsy O’Call-Again Show.
Anyone lucky enough to catch the now fabled edition will recall that the dialogue went something along the following lines:
She: Oh, doctor, touch my fingers.
He: Well, goodness gracious me.
She: You may be very clever, but how can’t you see
My heart beats too much, at a certain tender touch.
It goes boom boody-boom-boom, boody-boom
He: Well, goodness gracious me*.
This resplendent performance on that radio interview has since guaranteed the good doctor, and quite rightly too, almost total immunity from any type of criticism, good, bad or different. Did the Doctor know how to seel himself, or what. No Biffo, he.
(*Oddly enough, the English actor, P. Sellers also acted the part of Doctor Strangelove).
Finding ou that the off shore island was not the source of the sobriquet Perkie’s not so ancient inner mariner next metaphorically boarded Wee Felim’s wee boat / Baidin Fheidhlimi and set sail for another Angola which oddly enough also holds a resonance for students of folk music.
That would be Angola, the State Penitentiary of Louisiana, where in 1933, Huddie William Leadbetter, aka Leadbelly, the legendary blues singer, was both doing and keeping time. It was there indeed where the noted folk song collectors, the Lomaxes, father and son, ‘discovered’ him. And he to be singing his signature song, oddly enough also beginning with ‘good’, as in ‘Goodnight, Irene’, one verse of which goes as follows;
– Sometimes, I live in the country / Sometimes I live in the town.
Sometimes I take a great notion / To jump in the river and drown.
Suicide rates, of course, have never been higher in the Free Southern Stateen (sic).
To conclude: you mentioned Cuba, EB, which has a health system ‘to die for’, as the contemporary phrase has it. Sometimes, it takes ‘a great notion’ to fix a grave crisis. And so, here’s one, free, gratis and for nothing for the next Government of the Free Southern Stateen (sic) to consider:
Appoint the doughty Dr.David Hickey, recently retired Head of Transplantations at Beaumont Hospital as Minister of Health. He has close connections with the Cuban Health System and on one famous occasion, as he was being presented to a packed Croke Park on the 25th Anniversary of the all-conquering Dublin Gaelic Football team, the great forward stepped forward when his name was called on the PA.
And proceed to kick some ass by opening his jacket to reveal a T-shirt with the following grito:
-YANQUI ! leave Cuba alone !
The only formality to be negotiated would be to appoint him to the Seanad / Seanad first. It can be done, such a doddle is it. It, indeed, has to be known to be done, and recently too, at the stroke of a spindoctor’s pen.
Slainte ! Salud !
When it comes to health I think a lot more needs to be done to educate the public. You hear stories all the time about people turning up at A & E with ridiculously minor problems which could easily be sorted out at home. I remember reading in the papers a while back about a woman who phoned an ambulance because she had a splinter in her finger and a man who phoned emergency assistance because he had a cold. You hear of similar things happening when it comes to the police or fire services. Such stupid calls cost thousands of euros/pounds. I think it was in England but my favourite was the man who phoned the fire service because he couldn’t find his TV remote and needed help to find it….no, I kid you not.
The 26 counties does need its own Irish NHS and it can be economically viable but it must not be abused or waste money, it needs to be very strict. That’s why I believe that some services should charge, such as people who turn up at A & E drunk at the weekends or people who turn up for minor injuries/problems which could easily have been taken care off in their home. I think affordable prescription charges are a fair way to raise money but seeing your GP should always be free of charge.
Educating the public must always be at the heart of Health Care. Many health problems/injuries which DO require retreatment can be taken care off in other ways rather than queuing up at a hospital or waiting for a GP appointment. More needs to be done to promote Pharmacies as a place to turn to for help, advice and instruction. A campaign of health education would save hundreds of millions of euros and would make an Irish NHS more efficient.
Sinn Fein should push ahead with campaigning for an Irish NHS as part of their election manifesto but its important they don’t leave themselves open to attack by being accused by their opponents as “economic incompetents”. The irony is the people accusing SF of economic incompetence is the same people who nearly bankrupt the state……