Workers’ Party councillor Ted Tynan has said that it is time to replace two decades of lip-service on hospital overcrowding with immediate action to end the scandal of sick patients lying on trolleys in hospital corridors and wards.
Cllr. Tynan said that the hospital trolley crisis, like the Winter Vomiting bug, had become an annual fixture and the stock answer from both the government and the HSE that it was a temporary crisis was an insult to the patients involved and their families.
“Before the last election the Labour Party in opposition said the health service was at breaking point and suggested that the hospital trolley figures at that time should be a wake-up call to the then minister, Mary Harney. Almost five years on Harney is long gone but the crisis remains and is now worse than ever before”, said the Workers’ Party councillor.
He said that the crisis in the health service predates the current economic crisis and even if the government’s own claims of an economic uplift are correct, the crisis will outlive that too because the priorities of the current economic system are geared towards private profit. At a very minimum the 2,000 empty acute beds in hospital wards must be brought on stream urgently and the concerns of the nurses and other medical professionals in the wards must be listened to”, said Cllr. Tynan.