The Tánaiste and Minister for Health, Mary Harney, has said private hospitals will be used to allow people waiting a long period for public outpatient appointments with consultants, to be seen faster.
Private hospitals like St. X in Dublin 13 are taking patients from Public Hospital (10 minutes away) to carry out year old operations.
What?s wrong with that! OK, St. X isn’t exactly full today or yesterday, you can bet Public Hospital is a trolley park of misery. St X is owned by Doctors, and Doctors should know best how to run hospitals !
But what if the private hospital 10 minutes away from the publicly run hospital with a years back log purchase scheme beds to fill is owned by the same doctors that can’t see the patients in Public Hospital. I’m sure they welcome today?s news.
RTE NEWS says: The National Treatment Purchase Fund has been asked to run a pilot scheme allowing 5,000 patients at 14 hospitals awaiting outpatient consultations to be assessed for treatment by doctors at private hospitals.
‘assessed for treatment by doctors at private hospitals’ NO NEED MARY HARNEY, these same doctors saw the same patients over a year ago before letting them rot on the waiting list your government said it would abolish.
So get this; we are paying as tax payers as of today an extra €2.5 million of the €64 million Treatment Purchase budget, for Doctors in Irish public hospitals not to see their own patients in the public hospital but to allow the distressed patients go up the road to the same Doctor’s private clinic.
What would be better: fund the more cost effective solution, the public hospital. If that hospital needs extra resources, take over the privately run clinics. And study the following; how much of the waiting list backlog is due to Doctors moonlighting in their private clinics?
Now extend this scheme indefinitely; what have you got? Privatized public health from the neo liberal master privatizers the PD’s
I hope this doesn’t make you sick. but if it does… you know where to go.