Brendan Gleeson’s healthcare rant on the Late Late is nearly 17 years old, has anything changed? (17th March 2006)

Brendan Gleeson’s healthcare rant on the Late Late is nearly 17 years old, has anything changed? (17th March 2006) from ireland

25 comments

  2. What’s changed is the amount of money we throw at the problem. Every year it increases, but the situation gets no better. Just worse.

  4. Not at all. My mother, who had type-1 diabetes & terminal cancer, was left on a trolley for 3 days beside a lift in St. Vincents A & E before the pandemic with no one except ourselves checking her blood sugar levels. Subsequent visits to hospitals during the pandemic showed it wasn’t much better. From what I’ve seen since it’s only gotten worse.

  6. My diabetic father collapsed at 6am this morning and my mother couldn’t lift him. They live 200m from the hospital grounds/ambulance base. My mother rang an ambulance which arrived 3.5 hours later.

    He couldn’t stand up, walk and was in bad shape since yesterday. In fairness he was seen quickly, then at 1pm he was kicked home with a presciption as the hospital is like a warzone.

    Fuck this incompetent government and also fuck the opposition for not holding anyone to account or even suggesting a fix when they have nothing to lose. We spent the most money on healthcare in the world but have nothing to show for it.

  8. I’ve made this post before, but it’s still the answer, so such is life.

    Denis Naughten was once upon a time considered a potential future leader of FG and potential candidate for Taoiseach as a result. His background is not dissimilar to that of Simon Coveney – FG family and country posh. He has a background in food sciences. All very attractive to the modern-ish wealthy farmer.

    He joined the Seanad in his 20s when his father passed away in 1997. He then went for TD and sat from 1997 to 2007.

    He got elected to the Dáil in 2007 after a constituency rejig. He was re-elected in 2011.

    But that was where it all came crashing to a halt.

    Roscommon General Hospital was to be shut down.

    https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/better-outcomes-when-emergency-surgery-performed-by-busier-surgeons-study-finds-1.4085907

    The official position in Ireland, and most countries, is that you need fewer but bigger and more specialised hospitals. The problem is, voters are retards. Voters want lots of shit hospitals that will likely increase their chances of dying.

    So in 2011, Naughten had two choices – support a shit A&E department that was dangerous for his consituents or choose the course of action that would likely save lives. He made the political choice and went for the former. FG booted him.

    There has never been a FG TD in Roscommon-Galway. When it was Roscommon-South Leitrim, it was normally 2/3 FG.

    Right now a similar debate is playing out about Navan A&E.

    Irish people do not want the hospitals to be fixed and they do not want people off trolleys.

  9. I get his anger, but I think he underestimates how difficult it would be to bring in the necessary reforms.

    There are massively influential vested interests that would oppose any reform. It suits the consultants too well. They get all the experience in the public system and then make a fortune in the private one and they don’t have to choose between them. That’s why the consultants are trying to make sure Sláintecare fails.

    And that’s not to mention the bloat in the administration of the HSE. They’ll fight tooth and nail to keep the expensive, inefficient redundant jobs around.

    And management in general is terrible in Irish healthcare. I know people who work there from nurses, to pharmacists and doctors and they say that it’s shocking. Every hospital has its own leadership with no centralised authority. So what you get is a cabal of brown nosers running hospitals who only get promoted by being in the good graces of the leadership. And this leadership rarely has any experience outside that hospital so they’re convinced that they’re the best in spite of not having a clue how the rest operate. And they occasionally hire people from outside with the idea of bringing on fresh ideas but these people are quickly ostracised for rocking the boat by questioning terrible policy and management decisions. Those leaderships would also fight tooth and nail to keep control of their fiefdoms.

    And then there are the local hospitals. Nobody wants to spend years training to be a nurse or doctor and then live in the arsehole of nowhere where the population is too low to specialise in something that interests them. As a result these hospitals are effectively impossible to staff. So we’re pimping massive money to fund hospitals that can barely provide more care than a GP. But this issues well never get resolved because if any party tries to close them, any seats they hold in that constituency will be gone. It’s also why opposition parties promising healthcare reform will also support keeping them open.

    And even if any government had the guts to take these people on, public opinion would rally around the vested interests. Partly because those groups will put out sob stories of people losing their jobs, but also because people are generally so cynical about whatever big project a government does that they’ll rubbish it long before it has the time to actually achieve anything. And most politicians lose their nerve early on and scrap the program in the early stages. This has happened time and time again.

    To fix health requires parties that will tackle those vested interests and stay the course in spite of massive public backlash all while knowing that they’ll be kicked out of government before it starts to bear dividends.

    From what I can tell there’s no party in Ireland that’s either willing or able to do that. And while that remains the case the situation will not get better.

  10. Unfortunately the steps needed to fix the Irish health care system would likely be politically impossible.

    You can’t make 20k middle management admins (who would be essentially unemployable outside of the public service) redundant as this would piss off 40k plus voters.

    You can’t close countryside hospitals whose standards of care are stuck in the 80s. Same reason.

    You can’t redeploy people to where they are actually needed. Even if they wanted to go, where would they live ?

    You can’t change peoples rotas and working conditions. Expensive diagnostic machinery sits idle all across the country in the evenings and weekends with enormous waiting lists. Unions are too strong.

    You cant fix the people waiting years in acute hospital beds for discharge as there is no infrastructure there. No housing, no care homes, very limited home help

    You can’t roll out integrated ict systems that would be homogenous across the country as each health board is run as a private fiefdom and the government tendering is a joke.

    You can’t stop the thing, fix it and start it again. Trying to reform the health service is like trying to change the engine on a moving train. All the political parties know it’s a lost cause, no one is going to run on a platform of fixing the HSE.

  12. No nothing has changed because the majority of the voting Irish public are fucking idiots who keep voting in the same 2 parties election after election.

  15. We have one of the best funded healthcare systems in the world but it’s a basket case because of the utter mismanagement of it. Incompetent C-level civil servants, underpinned by layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy and middle managers, leaving a front-line that’s short staffed, over-worked and micromanaged to the point of uselessness. I know this first hand so this isn’t me talking out of my hat. I have a lot of family members at various levels within the HSE, working across different disciplines including a care assistant, social worker in a ‘home care’ facility, a paramedic, a very senior manager in the ambulance service, a mental health nurse, a pediatric nurse manager, a GP, and a few on the admin side in various levels up to Level 8. Every single one of them, without exception, has stories to tell that would leave you in disbelief at how things are run there. Giving an organisation like that a few billion more isn’t going to fix the problems there, it needs root and branch reform and restructuring from the bottom to the top.

    There is zero political will to do what’s needed to fix the health service because it would be political suicide for whoever does it and the unions would bring the country to a halt. And anyone that thinks SF are going to do anything to fix it when they get in is deluded, and that isn’t an anti-SF dig it’s simply the reality that no party will do what needs to be done here, so we’ll just continue to throw money at it and it’ll be a political football for years more to come while people needlessly die and suffer.

  16. I don’t know but my wife struggled with a lump on her neck for 6 months, we spent thousands in specialists and treatment on top of our fancy private insurance only to end up desperately flying her back to Japan where they ran all the same tests in 2 days, a biopsy the following week, and she was fixed 2 weeks later.

    I know countless stories of terrible practices that would be unthinkable in most EU countries, and countless stories of expats also resorting to flying back home and end up with the issue resolved much quicker. It’s pretty bad.

  17. Good man Brendan. Glad to see that prick Martin getting individually called out too, especially given the sycophancy offered in his direction the past week.

  19. Nah it hasn’t changed.

    The doctors and nurses aren’t too blame, overworked, underpaid and understaffed. The government have sat on their hands and done nothing.

    The hospital crisis and the housing crisis, going on for years and everyone just pointing fingers here, there and everywhere. No solutions, no changes, no help for people.

    It’s always stood out to me that my brother who had cancer was refused a disability benefit in Ireland on the basis he wasn’t “disabled enough”. Bloke couldn’t work for 2-3 years, how was he meant to survive without it if you took my parents out of the situation??

  21. House prices and rent have gone up. Education has become more expensive. Working conditions have gotten worse. Here’s to the next 17 years of a FF / FG tag team.

  22. It’s a black hole of immeasurable inefficiency managed by absolute fucking morons. No politician in this country has the will to take it on because ultimately they just care about re-election and fuck all else. The citizens of this country are by and large outrageously ill informed as to the absolute state of the service and therefore seem happy to have their tax dollars pissed up the wall in limp dicked attempts at trying to unfuck an unfuckable situation. We’re doomed

  25. Think I heard we hit a new record for patient on trolley numbers today so no I don’t think so.

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