Castlebar Mayor Cllr Eugene McCormack and his party colleague, Cllr Ger Deere have both stated this week they are confident the future of the Sacred Heart Hospital in Castlebar is secure with an announcement on enhanced facilities due to be made in the next few weeks.
Earlier this week more than 200 people attended a community rally in support of the Sacred Heart Hospital in Castlebar on Monday evening at which public representatives from Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein and the Labour Party were in attendance, as were members of the medical, nursing and general staff of the hospital.
According to a Fianna Fail spokesperson, while organised by the Castlebar Fianna Fail Cumann, it was a non-political event with no speeches or party slogans in evidence. That claim was rejected by Cllr Deere who told the Mayo Advertiser: “There are a lot of people who are saying why weren’t Fine Gael at the protests down there. You can say what you like but it was a political rally. One of the banners said, ‘save our centre of excellence’. What we in Fine Gael are saying is ‘enhance our centre of excellence’. The plans the HSE have in place is expected to see an increase in expert staff to deal with the rehabilitation of patients.”
Cllr Deere elaborated: “We look foward to the HSE announcing the future plans for the Sacred Heart Hospital in the very near future, which will consolidate the hospital for staff and the patients into the future. The HSE has had an application in for funding under the €28 million fund that was launched by the Minister for Health to establish a new ‘intermediate care tier’ to assess and treat older people, while ensuring that they don’t enter into long term care earlier than necessary. It is hoped that this will see the creation of up to nine new positions in the hospital.”
Rally organiser Conor Smyth of Fianna Fail explained that the rally was called to give the public the opportunity to signal its resistance to any moves to diminish the role of the hospital or phase out the services it has provided over many years.
He said there was widespread concern that the trend of reducing long stay beds in the hospital would continue.
“The number of long stay beds in the hospital has gone down from 300 to 120 and people are very worried that if this trend is allowed to continue, it may mean the end of the hospital as a long stay facilty.”
However, Cllr Eugene McCormack told the Mayo Advertiser, that since the introduction of the Fair Deal scheme the demand for long stay beds has fallen off. “The latest figures we have, up to Wednesday shows that there was no waiting list to get into the long term care in Sacred Heart Hospital and there were two beds free. Also, since the introduciton of the Fair Deal scheme in 2011, out of the 248 people who were approved for the fair deal scheme for long term care in Mayo, 200 of them selected private care and the most up to date figures for 2012 shows that out of 61 people approved there were 50 who chose private over public long term care.”
Both Cllr Deere and Cllr McCormack were keen to stress that no one currently in long term care would be forced out of the Sacred Heart Hospital, with Cllr McCormack stating: “There is a lot of worry amongst people that this could happen, but it was never on the table and people need to be reassured.”
