Summer of Discontent
It’s June — but with the Gulf Coast covered in oil and the Irish health service in meltdown, the summer silly season seems a long way off.
Dermot Stokes, 28 Jun 2010
For all that the early days of June mark the start of the summer season and should be typified by light and frothy news, the past weeks have been chock-a-block with big stories. You can't blink for fear you'd miss one. And they're blockbusters, each and every one of them.
Nationally, three stories stand out.
Regrettably, two are in the remit of the Health Service Executive - the wretchedly poor service afforded to children in care, and the misdiagnoses of miscarriage in several maternity hospitals.
The details are familiar by now, and have been well explored elsewhere in the media. What remains, at this point, is a lingering unease that there could yet be more bad news to come.
So far, most commentary has focused on the HSE and its apparent dysfunction. But the emphasis has largely been on operational, and therefore fundamentally personal, aspects.
This is consistent with popular interaction in which people's stories are the most valuable coinage. In such an environment, victimhood is your starter for ten. It's all about how people are let down by professionals and processes alike.
Fair enough, you might say. But this avoids the thorny historical and structural questions that must be understood and resolved, if things are to get better. One appreciates that such improvement is not actually in the interests of the media, which feeds off foul-ups and disasters — but believe me, most people would prefer dull competence to disastrous failure in both medical and social care fields.
In trying to understand how such awful things happen, it's important to remember that the HSE is an amalgamation of the old Health Boards. While there may have been good intentions behind formation of the original Boards, they turned into parallel local authorities with Tammany Hall politics in their souls. The HSE inherited a buzzing sack of debris.
As for the structural issues, one notes the views expressed by none other than outgoing HSE chief Brendan Drumm in a recent interview in the Irish Examiner, in which he said it would be easier to run if it did not have to take responsibility for children in care.
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