No rheumatology reprieve

QUESTIONS?Cllr Lisa Chambers, pictured with newly elected Cathaoirleach of Mayo County Council, Cllr Michael Holmes, at his homecoming last week, feels Mayo General Hospital should have a full time consultant rheumatologist.?Pic: Michael McLaughlin

No rheumatology reprieve


Part-time outreach service from Leitrim to replace promised consultant

Neill O'Neill

MAYO will not be receiving a permanent consultant rheumatologist as promised, but will instead have to do with an outreach service from Manorhamilton in Leitrim, after a third rheumatology post was confirmed there.
Speaking at last week’s meeting of the Regional Health Forum West, the Chief Operating Officer of the SAOLTA University Health Care Group, Tony Canavan, said that Mayo General Hospital can expect to have one of the three rheumatologists from Leitrim visit ‘in the order of two days a week’.
Cllr Lisa Chambers, who had raised the issue, was unhappy with this, and said that it was bad enough that despite long waiting lists and the recent cancellation of around 850 rheumatology appointments, Mayo was not going to get the cover in this area that it needed.
The post for Manorhamilton will be advertised in coming weeks, and it is expected to take up to six months to fill, something that councillors scoffed at. Tony Canavan explained that there are currently four consultant rheumatologists working in the region and that two more were being appointed (one in Merlin Park Hospital, Galway, and one in Manorhamilton), which was a 50 percent increase. He said they operate a service out of two centres in the region serving 800,000 people. He accepted that they were understaffed at ‘medical and nursing level’ when it comes to rheumatology at present.
Evidence of this, he said, was seen in the cancellation of the appointments, as the required levels of consultant cover ‘is not available over the summer’. He added that urgent and emergency cases will be dealt with.

Conflicting views
Mr Canavan informed Cllr Chambers that putting a single consultant post, such as rheumatology, into one location like Mayo General Hospital, has proved problematic in the past, as ‘service falls down when this happens, so we group consultants together to cover sick leave and holidays’. He said that each of the three consultants in Manorhamilton will visit Mayo in a ‘robust service arrangement’.
Cllr Chambers said she was not happy with the answers she was getting, saying they were ‘not stacking up’. She said the six-month timeline for filling a rheumatology post was ‘crazy’. All the while, she said, people are suffering and left to manage their own pain. Cllr Chambers also questioned the public service approach to such appointments.
Mr Canavan retorted that it was not about public service rules but about getting the best person possible for the job, whom he said could be abroad and could return to Ireland with ‘experience and world-class skills’. Cllr Chambers argued that MGH should have a full time consultant rheumatologist. This, she said, would allow he or she to see more patients and clear waiting lists quicker. She said it was ludicrous to suggest that a consultant travelling to Mayo two days a week could see more patients than one based in the county.
At this stage Cllr Michael Kilcoyne chipped in his support of Cllr Chambers, adding that the people of Mayo are being treated like second-class citizens.