12 months is still too long. Improvement, yes. Acceptable, still not.

Do you now what the real problem is…… The amount of people who need the services that really could help themselves…. Let’s take a close examination of the percentage of people in a typical outpatients that are f*****g fat and unfit, I was recently in tullamore waiting to be seen by a surgeon and all around me were fat f***s with breathing problems, walking problems etc, then ya leave the hospital only to see groups of people with oxygen bottles attached to there fecking heads with tubes SMOKING… And the people I hear moaning about the medical services are those people who frequent them regularly because of there fat holes.. Anyone who sadly has a chronic illness very rarely complains as they are genuinely ill… I don’t expect everyone to an Olympian but I do expect people to look after themselves in some fashion and try to keep themselves healthy..
Yesterday I walk into a cafe for a bit to eat and what do I see!! Bloody fat club, fat mother and two fat kids, eating bloody burgers and chips and do ya know what she was whining about to the owner ???? That her back is killing her and her legs are in constant pain… STOP EATING SHIT FOOD THEN and start walking.

Sounds like progress at last – just so long as performance towards meeting the target takes account of the fact that a 35yo waiting for an ingrown toenail op is not the same as an 8yo waiting to have spinal surgery to correct a disabling curvature.

The three main changes to NTPF seem on the face of it to be reasonable. However I can’t help thinking that depriving a hospital (that can’t cope with workload) of funding is a bit like thinking you can make an athlete run faster by starving them.

The HSE has made shit of so many hospitals by making them designated centres of excellence and/or by closing adjacent hospitals. In so doing they have diverted more patients to these hospitals. They have not increased the budgets of any of these preferred centres or reduced the budgets of those which they have attempted to downgrade. They havent decanted anything out of the main acute hospitals into the downgraded hospitals. At the same time, they have repeatedly cut hospital budgets for failing to achieve a score card of measures – one of which includes being within budget!

As with most organisations, staff costs represent 80% of hospital budgets. Again the HSE has made shit of hospital budgets by imposing pay increases on all major staff categories (e.g. Hospital consultants received €75,000 pay increase for no change in productivity). Hospitals can’t reduce staff costs through redundancy because of the Croke Park deal.

Hospital activity is a function of Patient Numbers x Hospital Resource/Quality x Time. Let’s not be too surprised if quality starts to suffer cos of our fixation about everything the other factors.

Minister Reilly has finally put an incentive in place for the underworked and inefficient hospital management to get off their behind and get the work done, good on him, finally a health minister that understands where the problem lies.

I seriously doubt that anyone working in a hospital with budget over-runs will be incentivised to work harder. Reilly will cut their budget, but they are still un-sackable and you still can’t cut their wages.

Basically what he’s saying is: “if you don’t work harder, I’m going to reduce the amount of paper clips you can use”.

So let’s put this in perspective; the government spends over a decade creating am underfunded, under resourced and inefficient health care system and then, instead or fixing the real problem, they are going to penalise individual hospitals for said inefficiencies?
Did they ever stop and ask themselves why there were long waiting lists?
Surely these couldn’t be the result of a top heavy health care system where there are more people managing the system then that there are providing healthcare?
It’s like chopping of your foot because you have a sore toe…

A year? A YEAR?

in fairness I think he is doing a great job . the health sector needs a good boot up the hole . well done .

Ah yes, but will the consultant in the other hospital do the dirt on his/her colleague with the long list and actually perform the procedure? Time will tell, but the medical profession is the last great monolith in Irish society, and monoliths are very hard to change. Still, if anyone can succeed surely it’s a doctor, right?