2nd April 2001
We have no legislation on "immigration" with regard to workers in this country because it is a new feature in our economy and the faster we get it the better.
If I was the mother of any of the Filipino nurses who have come here to prop up our chaotic health service and who were then put in the appalling accommodation we have seen on television I would tell my daughter that if she wanted to be properly treated she would be better off going to Saudi Arabia. Can you imagine the uproar if this had happened to Irish nurses abroad? Both IBEC and SIPTU have warned that we in Ireland need to be careful about how we treat our non-EU nationals who are working here and it is dreadful to see that the Eastern Region Health Authority can be cited as a bad example of what they mean.
It has been standard practice, however, for doctors and nurses to find they have had to live in substandard conditions. Reports on doctor-on-call rooms being in a deplorable state frequently appear in medical newspapers. It is tradition - as a house officer I and others lived in now demolished gate lodges at Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital which the porters had correctly refused to inhabit. Why has hospital management always felt that any accommodation, no matter how substandard, will do for doctors and nurses?
There was/is a long tradition, too, that doctors don't need offices. One of the main criticisms about Professor Ian Temperley by haemophiliac patients and their relatives at the Lindsay Tribunal is that he used to talk to them in corridors when imparting bad news. I hope by now it is obvious that this was happening because he had nowhere else to talk to them. Indeed every last one of the team treating haemophiliac patients has talked about lack of facilities about which they had complained to management for years.
When Eve was a girl and I was working in the above mentioned Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital Dr. John Goodbody, the greatly respected secretary of the Medical Board, tried for years to get what he described as a "weep room" where distressed relatives could gather, the Front Hall being entirely unsuitable. We never got a weep room, but surely management as well as doctors must realise how such places are needed. It is, as Ian Temperley can only too easily see, the doctor who gets the blame.
We will have to complain more. Some time ago in the Corridors of Power in Leinster House I met a very important member of health service management. I had just been up to St. James Hospital's A and E Department where Mr. Patrick Plunkett, the consultant in charge, had resigned from the Hospital Board such was his dissatisfaction with the facilities available in his department. The senior manager informed me when I expressed my concern that the £7 million being spent on a new A and E would solve all the problems. Now the increased space and beds will be a big help but it will be many, many months (years?) before it is in place and surely, in the meantime, an effort must be made to improve the lot of patients and staff. I saw very, very ill people lying on trolleys and doubt if they or their ilk will last long enough to see the new unit. And what about a total rethink at the lack of access for family doctors to hospital diagnostic units and facilities as mentioned by Dr. Patrick Treacy of this parish a few weeks ago.?
Foolishly, I expressed my concern, as well, about the very small number of Irish nationals employed at NCHD level in peripheral psychiatric hospitals. If there is one area of medicine where common culture and language are really important it must be in psychiatry and to have so many non EU nationals trying to provide a service is not fair on them or their patients. I was told it was ever thus. Is this another tradition that has been established in Irish medicine and therefore to be maintained?
Maybe it shows a dreadful lack of ambition on my part but I am glad not to be Minister for Health at present. If those managing the service do not see any problems how can they be solved? Aspects of medicine such as facilities and communication frequently land doctors in more trouble than lack of clinical care, but we seem to have done poorly in stressing the importance of both.
Senator Mary Henry, MD
