A week after Minister Mary Harney made a commitment to staff at Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe that the HSE would engage them in consultation about the future of the hospital, unions said yesterday (Thursday ) they had not yet had any contact from the health services.
However, the HSE said it has “this week invited the unions to a meeting to discuss their concerns relating to Portiuncula Hospital and Roscommon County Hospital”.
Following a meeting with Minister Mary Harney during her visit to the Ballinasloe hospital last Friday, IMPACT official Padraig Mulligan said the Health Minister had agreed that consultation should take place with staff about HSE West proposals that Portiuncula should report directly to the general manager of University Hospital Galway in future.
In spite of HSE assurances that unions had been invited to a meeting, he said yesterday that so far the HSE had not lived up to the Minister’s commitment. Mr Mulligan also branded as “outrageous spin” the HSE’s repeated insistence on refuting any suggestion that the hospitals are to be downgraded.
“How can they say the hospital is not being downgraded, when it has already been announced that this year’s budget for the HSE West is decreasing by €300 million?” he asked.
“We are looking for a factual account of what is going to happen, and to date that hasn’t happened.
“The Minister apologised to us last week for the lack of consultation and said the HSE would be in contact to begin a consultation process. We are waiting and so are hospital management and the local community.”
A meeting is to take place today [Friday] of a newly established group, the Portiuncula Hospital Action Committee, which is to organise a petition and march in support of hospital staff, the date of which will be announced later today. The group also intends to set up a forum to discuss the future of services at the hospital with local politicians.
IMPACT expressed concern some weeks ago that HSE West proposals to restructure health services in the region would lead to the downgrade of Portiuncula and Roscommon hospitals.
Minister Harney was unable to offer any guarantees last Friday on the future of services at the hospitals, and confirmed that the facilities would be reporting directly to the general manager of University Hospital Galway.
“The future of hospitals has to be on the basis of their network together. That’s what the Health Information and Quality Authority recommended in their report on the mid-west, that the hospitals should not be managed as separate entities but should be managed as a single entity...Clearly both from a doctor point of view and a service point of view the hospitals have to work as one; in other words you have three sites but one hospital effectively, and that means that services happen wherever it’s safe for them to happen,” said the Minister.
“What we are doing is upgrading patient services...I can’t say today that everything that happens here will be happening here next year or the year after or in five or 10 years time. What I can say is this hospital has a huge role to play - and Roscommon hospital - in providing hospital services into the future by the two working together with the University Hospital Galway.”
