The recently published Health Service Plan by the HSE raises as many questions for Kilkenny dependants on community healthcare and on hospital services as it answers according to local councillor Michael O’Brien.
Cllr O’ Brien believes that the plan targets a reduction of over 33,000 in emergency admissions to hospitals, but doesn’t give any details as to how that will actually be achieved, other than a brief reference to the development and implementation of a range of initiatives aimed at “emergency admission avoidance.”
“From my experience in public life, putting these targets in place and in the absence of any alternative structures, emergency services in hospitals will suffer, with hospitals under pressure not to make admissions.”
Cllr O’Brien, who is a Kilkenny nominated member of the HSE Forum, said there may well be potential to reduce hospital admissions through the use of facilities such as “medical and surgical assessment units,” but nowhere in the document, is there any explanation as to where any such new units will be situated and how they will be funded.
“The interdependency of non-acute hospital services means that you cannot interfere with one section without it having an adverse effect on the others,” he said.
The outspoken councillor said, “the HSE is the creation of the present government. Centralisation is their buzz word. Centralisation is the bottom line in their process of restructuring. But it should not be forgotten that a comprehensive range of restructuring proposals were presented to the Government by the HSE workers and their representatives in the pay talks before Christmas. The Government rejected those proposals and has left the job of managing our health services even more difficult than it should be,” he concluded.
