THE announcement of a review into urgent care at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) is too little too late to be useful for anything other than an election stunt.
That’s according to Rabharta mayoral candidate for Limerick and epidemiologist Dr Laura Keyes, who has criticised Health Minister Stephen Donnelly’s proposed review.
“If I am elected Mayor of Limerick, my first act will be to take my mandate and my expertise in public health epidemiology to Stephen Donnelly and force him to reinstate urgent care services in the Mid West,” Dr Keyes said.
“There are serious questions to be asked about the probity of this proposed review,” she told the Limerick Post.
“Firstly, the time for such a review has passed. When there was a large-scale change 15 years ago in closing the emergency departments in the Mid West, there was an onus on those who decided on that course to evaluate the impact of the change and monitor the situation in order to ensure that the decision remained sound. Why was standard practice not followed in the case of UHL and the Mid West hospital group?
“Secondly, the subject of any such review should be exactly how the necessary services are going to be provided, rather than whether they should be provided. The difference between ‘how’ and ‘whether’ here can already be measured in hundreds of lives.”
Dr Keyes said she “fully supports any review that proposes an evidence-based approach, but we are past the point of no return after 15 years without any clinical advice published supporting the delay”.
“Why is a review the priority rather than an urgent intervention into a crisis situation, and why does the apparently 15-year-old clinical advice underpinning inaction remain unpublished?”
Dr Keyes claims that the review is announced as a knee-jerk response to opinion polling for Fianna Fáil, rather than as a considered response to the crisis being faced at UHL.
“As an epidemiologist with a deep knowledge of the Irish health and social care context, I can say without doubt that the responsible public health measure is an urgent intervention,” she said.
“The single most obvious measure would be to fund the HSE so that the moratorium on staffing can be lifted. UHL is operating with large staffing shortages, depending on temporary and agency staff and it is putting the existing staff under enormous pressure.”
