Sinn F\u00e9in TD Se\u00e1n Crowe has described Health Minister Leo Varadkar\u2019s visits to Accident and Emergency wards\u00a0as a \u201cpointless public relations exercise\u00a0that will frustrate and bring cold comfort to patients on trolleys and deliver little if any\u00a0administrative change to the hospitals he visited\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Dublin South West TD said that over 4000 patients were on Accident and Emergency hospital trolleys or chairs\u00a0during the month of December and that this number would be likely to\u00a0increase in the month of January, regardless of the Ministers whistle-stop PR tour.<\/p>\n
Deputy Crowe said:<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the month of December there was over 4,000 patients on Trolleys and chairs in hospital Accident and Emergency wards right\u00a0across the State.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Dublin hospitals, there were 1,318 patients on trolleys.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year, Taoiseach Enda Kenny had the brass neck to blame Tallaght Hospital staff on a crisis in Accident & Emergency and the awful scenario where an elderly 91 year old patient was left on a trolley for 29 hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe conveniently ignored his own governments disastrous\u00a0cuts to health funding, the removal of thousands beds from the hospital system, the shortage of key staff, the lack of step down facilities, the failure to roll out primary care facilities and the\u00a0lengthening waiting list for life changing operations.<\/p>\n
\u201cMinister Varadkar\u2019s jaunt around the Accident and Emergency wards will be viewed by many staff and patients as more of the same posturing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWall to wall media coverage of the Minister expressing sympathy and all the time distancing\u00a0the Fine Gael \/Labour administration from the fallout of his policies<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems to be a lot\u00a0easier for Government politicians to blame hard working hospital staff or seriously ill patients for getting sick, rather than blaming the broken health system that their government has concocted.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Chief Executive Officer in Tallaght Hospital publicly warned back in 2013 that patient safety would be put at risk by budget cuts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is happening in the Health Service is a direct manifestation of a continuity of cuts.<\/p>\n
\u201cMinister Varadkar\u00a0will no doubt have lots to mull over this week after\u00a0seeing some of the difficulties and\u00a0the challenges facing hospital staff on a daily basis but no one has any confidence that his journey will deliver any change in direction or any relief for long suffering patients and hospital\u00a0frontline staff.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sinn F\u00e9in TD Se\u00e1n Crowe has described Health Minister Leo Varadkar\u2019s visits to Accident and Emergency wards\u00a0as a \u201cpointless public relations exercise\u00a0that will frustrate and bring cold comfort to patients on trolleys and deliver little if any\u00a0administrative change to the hospitals he visited\u201d. The Dublin South West TD said that over 4000 patients were on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2445,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443\/revisions\/2445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}