HSE has sent letters telling people on Friday to take their infirm relatives home from Clifden hospital – today, Monday, September 26th, 2022!
Hundreds of Connemara residents came together to demand our representatives make our voices heard — our community needs our hospital!
9 comments
By the looks of the age demographic I’m guessing it’s because there’s not enough young people living there to work as doctors and nurses
Not to be insensitive, but CDH is not a hospital by any kind of modern definition. It’s a glorified clinic with 4 patients, in a town of 1500 people. If the country as a whole is to have best-practice hospitals, then these aged, half empty, institutions need to be cut out.
There absolutely needs to be adequate health coverage for far-west Connemara, but that is not going to be a hospital. It just isn’t; and it’s a waste of energy and momentum to be calling for one. You would be better served looking at alternative methods, and ensuring you get them.
Living in rural areas means you will not have the same access to resources as if you lived in a city. It’s completely inefficient to run a health system like that. Surely you accept this is logical? There is a great hospital in Galway, be thankful. The vulnerable sections of society (in terms of health eg. Elderly) will unfortunately have to deal with accepting this as they get older. But it’s the world over. Btw I live in rural west of Ireland.
“We need to use all of the private beds and hospitals we can get our hands on for the upcoming twindemic of covid and winter flu” – Irish Govt.
“We’re closing a public hospital” – Irish Govt
Is it viable to have a hospital out in a place like Clifden?
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I know everyone would love to have a hospital in their backyard but there’s no way that’s viable for most of the country, especially not a place as remote as Clifden.
Nope. Institutions like these, in deep rural Ireland, isolated from the rest of the health network only lead to worst outcomes. It’s places like this that brought about scandals like symphysiotomy, which ruined the lives of dozens if not hundreds of women.
What we need are dedicated centres of excellence in the cities with a hefty helping of satellite rapid injury and primary care facilities, to keep people out of ED unless it’s for proper trauma response.
To be honest, Clifden Hospital hasn’t been a hospital in the real sense of the word for a very long time, long before Covid. It offers nothing in the way of medical treatment, it has an xray machine but nobody to operate it, if you were to walk in off the street, IF they let you in, they won’t do anything for you except refer you to UCHG. It is a hospice in all but name. Of course Clifden and the wider Connemara community needs a medical centre, but the Clifden Hospital is not fit for purpose in its current state. I for one am not surprised that the TD’s for Galway West are making such claims, they are as much use as chocolate teapots every one of them.
Maybe every square inch of the country shouldn’t have a house on it, maybe people should live in more populated areas so that services can be more efficiently provided. Maybe every rural town can’t have a hospital and if you CHOOSE to live there you accept that.
Ah, whadoiknow, I’m just some idiot on Reddit about to get downvoted.
Wow, lack of empathy much, fellow Redditors?
“I don’t live in the country, so, feck em!”
In addition to the negative impact on the hospitals’ finances, closing the inpatient units at most small rural hospitals would also have a negative impact on the rural communities they serve, particularly for those in a low income situation. Most of the inpatient admissions at small rural hospitals are senior citizens, and they are admitted for common acute medical conditions, such as cellulitis, pneumonia, and urinary tract infections, and for exacerbations of chronic diseases such as COPD, diabetes, and heart failure.
Although better primary care will help to reduce the frequency of these admissions, there will always be some patients who have a problem that requires a short inpatient stay before they can be sent home safely, particularly if they live alone. When a senior citizen or other community resident needs to be admitted to a hospital for a few days to address one of these conditions and there are no serious complications, it will be better for the patient to be admitted to the local hospital than to be transferred to a hospital in another city. At the local hospital, their regular physician can care for them and their family and friends can more easily visit and support them, and it is likely they will receive good care at the local hospital as well as at a large, busy urban hospital.
Moreover, most small rural hospitals do not just provide acute care in their inpatient units; they also provide inpatient rehabilitation and/or long-term care services in the swing beds. Closure of the inpatient unit would result in the loss of these services for the community. Since many small rural communities do not have any Skilled Nursing Facilities separate from the hospital, this means the residents of the community would have to go to facilities in other communities for rehabilitation or long-term care, again separating them from their community physicians and families.
Finally, think of the end-of-life care and attention patients need. Taking them out of their community is emotionally disturbing, and impacts the family as well — “commuting” to a distant hospital is impractical when dealing with the uncertainties of the end of life. Family being able to get to a community hospital on short notice is very different than an hour or more driving… necessitating expensive and oft impractical overnight accommodation far from home, to be near a loved one as they shuffle off this mortal coil.