Speaking in the Dáil last week in a special adjournment debate on Connolly Hospital, Deputy Joan Burton cited the Government’s preference for private over public healthcare as the key reason why Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown will be made to wait at least three more years for the MRI scanner which it was first promised nine years ago.

“The hospital is being forced to wait again for at least three more years for vital diagnostic and imaging equipment, including an MRI scanner, because the HSE has taken a decision in principle to wait until after a proposed new private hospital is built and opened on the hospital grounds under the Minister for Health and Children’s controversial private hospital co-location scheme. The preferred bidder for the private hospital is the Mount Carmel group and the HSE is considering its bid. However, the difficulty is the private group is insisting it should have the exclusive rights to imaging, particularly as it pertains to MRI scanners, in order that the public hospital cannot acquire such a facility. The public hospital will, therefore, have to pay for the services provided by the private hospital. Not only will the private hospital receive all the tax breaks and other lucrative incentives from Government, it will be provided with an income stream from the sale of services to the public hospital.

“HSE management and its predecessors promised updated MRI scanning, imaging and radiological equipment for Blanchardstown hospital nine years ago. It was due to be installed at the conclusion of phase 1 of the new hospital building. It was then deferred to the beginning of phase 2, which is nearing completion, but now it has been long fingered until the private hospital is built.

“The Minister of State may enlighten the House as to whether the HSE has agreed to proceed with the private hospital. Once approval has been given, the private hospital will go to planning and tendering, be built and commissioned and finally opened, all of which will take three years. In the meantime, the thousands of patients in Connolly Hospital, many of whom come from the Minister of State’s constituency in County Meath, will be ferried by ambulance or taxi and accompanied by ambulance and nursing staff to Beaumont Hospital, the Mater Hospital, the new private hospital in Hermitage or the Bon Secours to have necessary imaging undertaken. The cost to Connolly Hospital will outweigh the capital cost of buying and using a scanner and facilitating the hospital’s teams by providing full diagnostic equipment. There is imaging equipment in relatively small hospitals in European countries that have not experienced the Celtic tiger, such as rural areas in France or the Czech Republic, and one would not be carted off in an ambulance or taxi with accompanying hospital staff to undergo diagnostics.

“The situation in question is an extraordinary feature of life at Connolly Hospital, inefficient and cruel to many of its patients. It is also costly. On ideological grounds, the Government appears to have decided that public patients at Connolly Hospital who have paid their taxes cannot have vital services because the private hospital wants a lucrative element of private medicine. Given the downgrading of Navan hospital in County Meath and the population on the western side of Dublin West, Dunboyne, Clonee and Navan, it is extraordinary that the Government should allow a blinkered ideology that seems to favour private medicine even though taxpayers, including those insured by VHI, pay for public medicine. It is also extraordinary that we in Blanchardstown and County Meath must wait a minimum of three years before people can access services locally. It is ideology gone mad and I hope that the Minister of State will tell the House that she may have been able to persuade her colleague, the Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Harney, to see some sense in respect of the Connolly Hospital situation and to provide the facility.

Below is the Dáil reply by Deputy Mary Wallace.

“I thank Deputy Burton for raising this important matter and I join with her on the excellence and hard work of staff at Connolly Hospital. As a former staff member of the hospital, there is no doubt about the wonderful work that occurs therein.

“The prioritisation of capital requirements is a matter for individual hospitals, including Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown. A hospital must indicate to the HSE the priority attaching to each development with regard to other competing needs within the hospital. When Connolly Hospital identified its capital requirements for 2008-09 to the executive, an MRI scanner was not among the hospital’s immediate capital priorities. This was on the basis of the current numbers of patients presenting at the hospital for the service and the clinical requirement to treat large volumes of patients so as to ensure consistent quality service provision. The HSE has indicated that there is no waiting list for MRI services at Connolly Hospital. The clinical requirements of the hospital’s patients for MRI services are currently being met through Beaumont Hospital or via the purchase of private capacity.

“The potential for developing an MRI service at Connolly Hospital was identified in the context of the development of a co-located private hospital on the campus and associated increased patient volumes. I understand that the executive will take a decision on this matter in the context of proposals for developing a co-located private hospital at the Connolly Hospital site. This is in the context of the co-location initiative allowing for new ways for public and private sectors to work together on a single campus.

“The HSE is aware that Connolly Hospital has experienced increased activity levels for diagnostics and will continue to monitor these on an ongoing basis with a view to developing increased capacity if required.”

Deputy Joan Burton has been advised that the new access bridge at Connolly Hospital, adjacent to the N3 roundabout cannot open until the improvements to the nearby N3 and M50 are completed. The NRA has confirmed the construction of the bridge was completed ahead of schedule but that ‘this new hospital access couldn’t open without the other associated works being complete as the road layout to which it would connect needs to be in place.’

“The M50 and N3 roadworks are scheduled for completion before end 2010. There seems to have been a complete lack of joined-up thinking when it came to the scheduling of the completion of the new bridge. It should have been built to coincide with the completion of the roadworks nearby since the opening of the bridge is dependent on their completion.

“Effectively the junction needs to be completely remodelled before the bridge can be opened. This will, unfortunately, take several years. While the bridge could technically be opened now, the NRA have assured me that this could pose ‘serious health and safety issues for traffic using the new entrance.’

“The NRA has said that the upgrades to the M50 and N3 could be sequenced so as to allow for the opening of the new bridge before the completion of all of the local roadworks. I would call on the NRA and Fingal County Council to now do everything in their power to ensure the most efficient sequencing is put in place. It is important that people using the hospital are able to see the benefit of this piece of infrastructure rather than having watch it standing idle as they travel around the world to enter the hospital.”

Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown, may be forced to wait up to three more years for vital diagnostic equipment including an MRI scanner because of a HSE decision to wait until after the proposed new private hospital has been built and opened.

This news was given to Labour Party Deputy Leader Joan Burton TD at a meeting last week of local TDs for the North and North West areas of Dublin with the HSE

The HSE management told the TDs that they now propose to provide MRI facilities for Blanchardstown exclusively through the proposed private hospital.

“I was shocked at what the HSE management had to tell me about their plans which will mean that people in Blanchardstown will have to wait up to three more years for these basic modern diagnostic facilities”, Joan Burton commented.

“At the moment, patients in Blanchardstown are ferried to Beaumont, the Mater and indeed the new private hospital at Hermitage when they need an MRI for diagnosis. This puts a huge cost burden on Connolly Hospital.

“It seems unbelievable that vital treatment for the tens of thousands of people who use Connolly Hospital is now going to be delayed in order to provide extra business for a private hospital yet to be planned, never mind constructed, commissioned and opened.

“The MRI scanner, which would cost less than €2m to develop in the existing hospital, was promised eight to nine years ago as part of phase 1 of the hospital’s reconstruction. Then it was promised for phase 2. Now it appears it is not going to be provided to the public hospital at all. Instead it will be part of the private hospital and use of the equipment will then be hired by the public hospital. So tax payers will pay on the double for facilities that are taken for granted in most public hospitals, not just in Ireland but around the world.

“The HSE and the Minister for Health seem hell bent on prioritising the building of a private hospital in Connolly Hospital’s grounds and to run down the public hospital so as to create a demand for private care.

“At this stage we don’t even know the timetable for the private hospital or if it can go ahead at all in the present investment slowdown. Whether or not a private hospital is built at Blanchardstown, it should not prevent the provision of up-to-date equipment for Connolly Hospital which last year attended to 35,247 people in A & E, 102,000 outpatients, and carried out over 3220 major operations and 3448 minor operations.

“What this FF, PD. Green Government is doing to Connolly Hospital is nothing short of a scandal and Labour will be mounting a major campaign in the coming months to bring public pressure to bear on the Government parties to change their policy and provide the funds for the public facilities in the 2008 Budget next December.”

Reports today that Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown has been forced to institute a programme of major cutbacks in it services is proof positive that the health system is failing to a spectacular extent, the people of Ireland, and the people of Dublin West in particular.

Connolly Hospital is facing a significant shortfall in funding this year, and it is inevitable that as these cut backs are pushed through, patients will suffer. The hospital will be closing beds, reducing the number of student nurses, closing a surgical day ward, and closing out-patients services among other draconian measures.

It makes no sense whatsoever that at a time when the population of the catchment area is increasing so rapidly, and when more and more demands are being placed on our the hospital, the HSE is actually planning to cut services. The book-keeping culture that prevails in the HSE has led to a situation where patients will have to wait longer and travel further for treatment that they badly need.

I understand that the hospital is facing an annual €5m bill for agency workers which has come about, largely as a result of the recruitment embargo. The embargo is forcing hospitals like Connolly to pay for expensive agency staff, when it would make much more sense to recruit and pay staff directly.

Cuts like these further aggravate the divide in the Irish health services, whereby those who can afford to pay can get first class treatment, when and where they want it, while those relying on the public facilities have to wait for months or even years. What’s particularly galling is the reported plans to admit more private patients at the expense of public patients, further exacerbating the two-tier nature of our health system, while at the same time, progressing plans to build a private hospital on the Connolly Hospital grounds.

It is increasingly clear to me that the HSE is unable to manage its own empire, and that Mary Harney’s health reform process in 2004, resulted in the creation of a monster that is simply too unwieldy to actually work.

I will be raising this matter with the Minister Harney in the Dail at the earliest opportunity, and will bring pressure to bear on the Minister to make sure that these daft plans are scrapped.

Labour TD Joan Burton is to seek an Adjournment Debate in the Dail this week on the report in today’s press that the waiting list at the Urology Unit at Connolly Hospital has gone past 2 years and that the Unit has to close its doors to all non-emergency cases.

“This is a shocking state of affairs and is of particular concern at a time when men are being encouraged to go for regular screening to detect prostate cancer. On the one hand the HSE is encouraging men to seek early diagnosis but on the other hand the same men find the hospital service is unable to cope with the extra demand.” Joan Burton said.

As a result of the Connolly closure urology patients from Dublin 15 have to go elsewhere for treatment and this in turn is adding to the pressure on services at the Mater and other hospitals.

This situation shows up the Government’s lack of commitment to the long- term development of Connolly Hospital. Their sole policy at present is to encourage a private hospital on the Connolly site and as a result the entire development plan for the public hospital is on hold, according to Deputy Burton.

“I propose to ask the Ceann Comhairle for permission to have an Adjournment Debate this week where the Minister will be required to attend and answer questions as to how this situation has been allowed to come to this point. The hospital has made a funding request for an additional urology consultant and I will want to know why this request has not been acted on to date.”

There has been a worrying increase in the number of patients on trolleys in Connolly hospital over recent weeks. On Wednesday the 7th of March last there were 16 patients on trolleys in Connolly Hospital.

This build up in A&E has forced Connolly hospital to cancel significant amounts of elective surgery in recent weeks. Connolly Hospital is now waiting over 5 years for the promised phase 2 of its development including extra beds to allow the operating theatres to perform at full capacity.

The government delayed for almost 7 years phase 1 of the re-building of Connolly Hospital. The delivery of Phase 2 of the hospital re-development cannot be allowed to drag out for the same length of time.

Connolly Hospital has also been waiting for a promised MRI scanner which costs only €2nm, small money compared to the €184 billion that the Government has committed to spending on the NDP.

Deputy Burton said, “Connolly Hospital is now the only major Dublin teaching hospital without an MRI scanner and various other vital pieces of modern radiology equipment. I recently received figures from the HSE which showed that a total of 2,183 patients were transferred to Beaumont, the Mater and other hospitals for MRI and other imaging procedures in 2006 with a further 130 transfers for January 2007.”

“At the moment, up to 40 patients a week are ferried at significant cost to have MRI scans done at distant locations such as Beaumont and the Mater through intensive traffic. The medical care teams in Blanchardstown are also understandably concerned that because the imaging is done at distant locations, the medical and care team for the patient is restricted in the amount of contact they can have with the medical team taking the scan and doing the imaging.”

“The HSE must fast track the delivery of Phase 2 of the hospital redevelopment and urgently review and bring forward the provision of MRI and scanning facilities for Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown.”