New York trip blighted by conditions in military hospital swamped by war wounded
20 March 2007
It is the Chrysler Building which is the symbol of New York for me. Not the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State nor the late lamented twin towers of the World Trade Center. It is the glorious, shining art deco Chrysler and how lucky I felt to be back in New York looking out my hotel window at it there in the sun.
My first visit to New York was four decades ago when I landed at Idlewilde Airport as JFK was called then one June day in a thick tweed suit to take up a summer job in St Joseph's Hospital, Paterson, New Jersey (pronounced then and now "Nu Joisey").
Having got over the shock of the humidity and the feeling that I would need to be resuscitated in the hospital Emergency Room I settled into 39½ Washington Square, running in the morning to the bus station to travel out to Paterson. And so began my love affair with the Big Apple. I take every opportunity to go there.
So, when a volunteer was needed to go to the International Parliamentary Union's meeting at the United Nations session on Discrimination and Violence against the girl child, between my interest in the topic and love of New York I was there in the front row.
The meeting was good but the stories were familiar all the first morning. It was in the afternoon that a speaker brought up a problem I had not heard of before and which we in Ireland should address.
A young senator from the Philippines, Pia Cayetano, spoke about the families of women workers who leave the Philippines to work abroad and whose remittances are so important to that country. Bearing in mind that we have so many Filipino workers, male and female here, I sat up and put the jetlag to one side.
About one-in-12 of the nurses in our health service is from the Philippines and I had the impression that happy grand parents were back home looking after the children. Not so, the senator said, and she painted a very worrying picture. Frequently, she said, the eldest girl in the family leaves school to act as a surrogate mother. So, the educated woman of one generation goes abroad and her daughter, the next generation, is removed from education. Worse still, and I hope it is rare, the girl becomes a surrogate wife and after an incestuous relationship drifts into the sex trade.
I would have to say I was horrified and asked for time to speak. I said I thought host countries had some responsibility towards their employees and if the workers are to stay for any length of time their spouses and families should be allowed to join them. This separation of families should be all too familiar to us Irish because we suffered from such problems for decades, with fathers going to Scotland and England when times were bad here, returning for holiday visits only. Therefore, we should be super-sensitive to the issue.
On my return I made investigations at the Departments of Justice and Enterprise Trade and Employment and these have led me to conclude that the present situation is ambiguous. Depending on the length of stay of the worker the spouse and family may come, work permits being given to the spouse in some cases. Because we are so dependent on foreign nurses their position and that of their families appears better than that of non-EU citizens in domestic work. It was not possible to get a clear answer about their families' situation, even though all families have the same needs.
I will pursue this issue in the Seanad and would hope for a good response from the Government. The family defended in the Irish Constitution should not be just the Irish family.
A woman from Afghanistan spoke, sans burka, about the lack of status of the girl child there. Unregistered at birth, in some parts of the country the child is considered of so little value she could be traded for cattle or dogs. The Trocaíre advertisement on TV pointing out the dangers in life to the girl child must make us all wake up and support the Campaign against Gender Based Violence which has been initiated in this country by some of our own NGOs and to its great credit, Irish Aid and make it into an EU and then UN campaign.
A sad story which mainly affects men blighted the stay in New York. The appalling physical conditions in some parts of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC and hotels where they keep patients were exposed. Walter Reed has been one of those hospitals I have visited on and off for years and admired the work carried out there. It is a veterans' hospital and the Americans have always prided themselves on giving the very best of treatment to their veterans.
The first time I went to the hospital was in the early '70s. The Bethesda section of the Washington Metro was being completed and I walked through the mud the last half mile to the hospital. Great research had been done on arterial reconstruction during the Korean War and similar work on veins was carried out on those injured in the Vietnam War and this I wanted to see. Their results were superb.
Times have changed at Walter Reed. The huge number of casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has overwhelmed the services available. In the Second World War 30 per cent of Americans who were seriously wounded died. In the Vietnam War it was reduced to 16 per cent but in the present wars it is only 9 per cent. While this reduced mortality rate is good, a number of patients with horrific injuries are not getting the treatment they need. The improved body armour means that those with serious head injuries and amputations arrive back in the US needing long-term care.
The increasing costs of running veteran establishments not only at Walter Reed, in recent years has led to the emergence of the magic word "privatisation". Some time ago 300 maintenance workers at Walter Reed and associated facilities were replaced by a private firm employing 60 - the dreaded word "Haliburton" has been mentioned. Is it any wonder there is mould on the walls and rats running around? How could 60 do the work of 300 unless the latter were lolling about all day?
Such treatment of veterans would not have happened some years ago. The Commander-in-Chief needs to act.
Senator Mary Henry, MD
