The threatned closure of the Dochas Cancer Care Unit at our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda has sparked a wave of public anger right across the north-east region. A protest march, organised by the SOCU (Save Our Cancer Unit) group will take place in the town on Saturday June 7th.
The March starts at 3pm from St. Peter’s Parish Church in West Street and will make it’s way to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. The organisers are hoping for and working towards a big turnout for the protest.
I personally hope that there is a big turnout from health service workers and from the local community. There was a huge demonstration in Monaghan to stop the closure of their hospital. 5,000 attended a demonstration on May 10th. If there is a good turn out in Drogheda, there is the opportunity to form a campaign not only locally but one that is linked nationally.
More than 150 people attended a conference convened by the Campaign for a Real Public Health Service at Liberty Hall in Dublin on Saturday 19th April. The campaign emerged following a meeting hosted by the Socialist Party in January where Dr Marie O’Connor and Prof John Crowne spoke of their experience of the health service in Ireland.
The conference came at a time when the government is stepping up its twin campaigns of cutbacks and privatisations and was addressed by many speakers involved in the fight against these policies. The Socialist Voice’s Mick Barry got the views of some of the participants at the conference.
Peadar McMahon, Chairman of the Monaghan Hospital Action Group said: ‘17 people had died to date as a result of cutbacks at Monaghan Hospital. Marie O’Connor, PRO of the Health Service Action Group, said that government policy would result in more than 4,000 bed closures in the next six years – the biggest closures of bed services since the 1980s.
Professor Allyson Pollack of the Centre for International Public Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh said: ‘That the UK equivalent of colocation and privatisation had resulted in 23,000 NHS beds being closed under the New Labour government’.
Dr John Barton, consultant physician at Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe, predicted that the Irish health service would end up with 45% of hospital beds in the private sector compared to just 16% in the US.
Philomena Canning, a midwife and member of the National Birth Alliance said: ‘There were 88 fewer places ( 20 as opposed to 108 ) where women could go and give birth than there were 30 years ago as a result of the centralisation policies of successive governments’.
John Gahan, psychiatric nurse in Dublin and active trade unionist: “We’ve just found out that the proposal to build a psychiatric unit at Beaumont has been scrapped and they’re now going to put a co-located for-profit hospital on the same site. We need to make the trade unions and ordinary members aware of what’s going on, they need to be more active on the issue of co-location and condemning it.
“That’s why our branch has a resolution going to conference condemning co-location and the government policy of implementing a two-tier health service.
“The recruitment embargo is still there. In Connolly Hospital, there’s a unit where the clinical nursing manager has not been replaced. The only way around that is to lose a staff nurse on the ground and run the unit with a nurse short. So there’s no permanent manager of that ward.
“The HSE have also introduced a non-qualified nursing grade with lower salary and less entitlements on pensions and general rights to replace qualified nurses with four years training. A lot of quality will be lost.”
Ann Codd, campaigning to keep St Luke’s Hospital, Dublin open:
“My sister fought a nine year battle against cancer and had to attend hospitals all over the place. But she received wonderful care at St Luke’s – the ambience, grounds, everything about St Luke’s is wonderful. It’s been proven as a centre of excellence where patients come from all over the country.
“Now they’re planning to move cancer patients to St James’ and Beaumont. In St Luke’s from the cleaning lady to care on the ward, everything is top class which for cancer patients is therapeutic – it can’t be recreated at Beaumont or St James’ with its overcrowding and traffic running through. Centralising is not about a better service.
“There’s isolated campaigns all over the country, there must be a way of bringing them together to force the government to change because there’s so much discontent.
This article first appeared in the Soicalist Voice www.socialistparty.net
