Health is the key battleground

There is political consensus on major health reform, and all the main parties agree that Sláintecare – a ten-year roadmap for building a ‘world class’ health service – is the way to go.

But that doesn’t mean health has been depoliticised – far from it. In fact, the state of our country’s health service, along with housing and homelessness, could dominate the campaign ahead of polling day on Saturday, February 8.

And locally that means the spotlight will be on the Saolta Group’s public hospitals, University Hospital Galway, Merlin Park Hospital, and Portiuncula University Hospital in Ballinasloe, as well as community health services.

The Emergency Department at UHG, regularly grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons, is one of the busiest and most overcrowded in the country. Over the past twelve months, more than 75,000 patients were seen at the ED – 200 every day on average.

All parties agree that a new ED will help ease the pressure but that is some years off, and in the meantime, patients experience daily horror stories of overcrowding, and long waits on trolleys in hospital corridors.

About 10% of the patients who visited ED – some 7,452 over the year – were left waiting on trollies, a record high for UHG, which consistently has highest number of patients on trolleys in the INMO nursing union’s trolley watch figures. Separately, more shocking statistics revealed that 1,751 people aged over 74, had to wait for more than 24 hours on trolleys in UHG’s ED.

The General Election was called at a particularly troubling time for local hospitals – the Emergency Departments of UHG and Portiuncula were full to capacity, with record trolley figures and the HSE apologised to patients in both hospitals who had to endure long waits to receive treatment.

Flu exacerbated the overcrowding problem but unless and until more capacity is added – and that means more beds in hospital and in the community, to facilitate quicker discharges – then the ED will remain a controversial flashpoint for politicians, and a place where many patients have negative experiences.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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