Varadkar must focus on community care – Cllr Conway Walsh

Varadkar must focus on community care – Cllr Conway Walsh


Dormant multi-million-euro accounts could boost rural hospitals

Áine Ryan

MAYO’S downgraded small hospitals could benefit by millions of euros from Dormant Bank Accounts recently transferred to the State. That is the view of Sinn Féin Cllr Rose Conway Walsh (pictured) who says that the €53 million boost to the State coffers ‘should be used to treat patients in their own local communities’.
She has called on the recently appointed Minister for Health, Leo Varadkar to ‘redesign a system,’ that has been disastrous for rural communities, ‘around the patient’.
 “This unexpected money, which is available because citizens have not claimed old bank accounts and insurance policies, needs to be used in a way that will make the most difference to the quality of peoples’ lives. The erosion of health services in rural areas and the centralisation and privatisation of healthcare by both this Government and the last continues to cause suffering to people when they are at their most vulnerable,” Cllr Conway-Walsh said.
She believes ‘a fraction of this money’ would turn ‘the likes of Belmullet District Hospital and other small hospitals in Mayo into viable and vibrant local hospitals where many additional health services could be delivered effectively and efficiently’. 
This, she says, would save sick people and their families from enduring long round-trips of hundreds of miles and ‘provide a fully serviced step-down facility for patients ready to be discharged from Galway, Sligo and Mayo General Hospitals’. This, in turn, would free-up beds for patients who need care in acute hospitals.
Ms Conway Walsh says this windfall present an opportunity for Government ‘to examine a new model of healthcare provision in rural Ireland’. 
She observes that this would be an ‘accessible model where patients are treated with dignity and compassion and where the local community has a genuine say in how healthcare is designed and delivered’.
She cited the views of Simon Stevens, the newly appointed chief executive of the NHS in Britain, as affirmation of this policy approach. He recently said: “NHS must stop closing cottage-style hospitals and return to treating more patients in their local communities. Most of Western Europe has hospitals which are able to serve their local communities, without everything having to be centralised.”