Editorial: 'Growing scandal of public services'

(stock photo)

Editorial

In this newspaper today, Dr Ciara Kelly provides a disturbing account of what it is like for an elderly patient on a trolley awaiting a hospital bed: "They're in pain, they're nauseated, they're feverish, they're weak, dehydrated or confused. We all know what it is to feel very unwell, we've had the flu or a broken limb, or a gastric bug. Well, multiply that feeling by 10 - because you're now sick enough to be admitted to hospital.

"And imagine feeling that way when you're also old and frail. And then experience it lying on a hard, two-foot-wide trolley that hurts your arthritic hips and your aching lower back, under fluorescent lights that never go off, day or night, and add noise and smells and commotion with people throwing up and shouting and fighting, so you're frightened by your surroundings.

"And just to make it worse, you worry because you're not properly dressed for being out in public and you're anxious about what will happen if you need to get to a toilet in a hurry - and that is what it's like to be on a trolley in A&E. You're sick, frightened, anxious and in pain. All of us know when we're sick, we long for our own comfy bed, dim lights and peace and quiet - well this is the absolute antithesis of that. It is horrendous."

Last Thursday, almost 650 people were on trolleys awaiting a hospital bed, which fails to account for the number also on chairs, or on the floor in wards. For more years than is tolerable, the dire situation at the emergency departments in our hospitals has been accepted as normal, when it should be anything but the norm. It is an outrage. Today Dr Kelly also provides a common sense prescription for the problem, which is required reading and urgently needs to be implemented.

The scandal of our emergency departments is but one part of the scandalous state of basic public services in this country. In recent times, the level of overcrowding on our rail services has been highlighted, a problem verging on dangerous but also with no end in sight.

Add to that what is currently happening in relation to the provision of water services. More than 600,000 people have been issued with "boil water" notices for the second time in three weeks, because of the poor quality of water being taken from the River Liffey. The State's Water Advisory Body has criticised as "unacceptable" the extent of leakages from the public supply network. Nothing new there. The management, maintenance and operation of treatment plants remain exclusively with local authorities before being transferred to Irish Water in several years' time.

At this level, in our hospitals, on our transport services and within our local authorities, employees in the frontline bear an enormous burden and huge levels of stress, and can not be held culpable for what is a failure of governance in general. The problems run far deeper than the frontline, and can be laid at the door of a wider political and public administrative system which seems to accept a large measure of mediocrity, even failure, and offers no real willingness to invest in and reform the public services which citizens deserve.

At what point did this come to be accepted? It is no longer acceptable. It never was.