There is clear and irrefutable knowledge that there is no room at the inn. Pic: Getty Images
Reeling from the completely predictable chaos in the emergency departments this month, Dr Garrett FitzGerald believes the ‘make more room at the inn’ argument must finally prevail, and that those in charge must, like Elvis, leave the building.
It’s health service comedy season again. It gets funnier every year. As a result of a couple of mild winters, the jokes were damp enough in recent times. This year, they’re rolling in the aisles — many off their trolleys altogether.
The DoH-HSE Failure/A&E Abandonment of Patient and Responsibility Show is back on the road, bigger and better than ever. The line-up of comedians is world class. Here is a flavour of the hilarity. It’s quite preposterous, but that’s what comedy is all about.
There is no room at the inn (laughter).
(Background: it has not occurred to anyone that the inn might be too small. The problem of ‘no room at the inn’ began many years ago when the inn was downsized.
The current innkeepers are permitted almost any solution that does not include making more room at the inn. The inn needs a large annex that can be opened when the inn is full. This would ensure that there would always be room at the inn. Footnote: there is no such entity as winter, viruses are imaginary.)
Pigs and Dogs
There is a sign over the door: Pigs and Dogs Entrance (audience reminded that these were once known as ‘Patients’ — screams of hilarity).
INMO figures point to excess of 600 Pigs and Dogs in the vestibule of the inn (paradoxical laughter at the impossibility of this; unimaginable in a first-world country).
Head of HSE blames elderly and infirm “bed blockers” (many members of audience carried out — some taken to A&E for four days of waiting. Due to volume of laughter, audience does not catch the bit where he says ‘it’s not an issue of capacity’).
Next day, a senior HSE comedian says crisis is over, only 580 extra P and Ds (giggle-incontinence amongst some ladies in the front row).
Minister fresh from the holliers asks non-existent nurses and doctors to put shoulder to wheel (more punters wheeled out).
Minister says he ‘expected’ this crisis (oxygen masks drop down on to members of the audience, many of whom have apoplexy).
Fianna Fáil say the situation is a disgrace (several head injuries from falling on floor of the auditorium).
The ’infection’ word or the ‘virus’ word have not been yet used. (Hahahahahaha).
‘Winter’ not mentioned (silence, a joke too far).
At this stage, I switched off the show. One can only take so much short of pneumothorax. If you get this condition, you know where they’ll send you!
Thanks be to the heavens, none of this could be real. It would make you think of an imaginary doomsday scenario where much of it would be true.
Seriously, could you imagine a situation where 600-plus people were waiting on trolleys and chairs? Where decades of making the same mistakes with increasing confidence would be tolerated? Where the highest authorities in our health services would be shown to have absolutely no clue as to what they are on about? Where there is chronic denial of reality? Where patients are treated like animals? Where everything is on the table apart from the solution?
Where there would be such deliberate mistreatment and abandonment of patients to a level where the life of the patient is deliberately put at risk?
Is this what the real truth is? For millennia, people have been getting sick in the winter due to a combination of adverse weather and infection.
A system in which this essential truth is denied and consequently not acted upon responsibly could at best be a failed entity. The most charitable conclusion is that those in charge must have lost their way.
They have passed their sell-by/ usefulness date. It would be time that all of the top layers in health administration put the pens into the top pocket and, like Elvis, leave the building. Today would be best.
It would be, at least, morally wrong to subject our citizens to such maltreatment as has been demonstrated. The country was in uproar recently about a homeless man who died in a doorway in Dublin. Urgent measures to prevent further such tragedies were put in train. There is no parallel in our health service. None of the necessary, effective urgent measures (there is only one really) have been put in place to alleviate the conditions endured by our A&E brethren.
There was at least a perception that there was no room at the inn for the homeless man. There is clear and irrefutable knowledge that there is no room at the inn for our trolley/chair people.
The Government measure urgently implemented for the former was to make more room at the inn. For the latter, that solution, however obvious, is denied down to the last administrator. No pity at all.
If such a scenario really did occur in our little country’s health services, you would have to transmit to our health bigwigs a clear message; you have failed and there is no hope for you as evidenced by decades of failure by you and your kind. Do the decent thing. Pick up thy pen and walk. Close the door on the way out.
Ain’t nobody laughing.
