I wish to outline to the Minister the reality of what is happening in my area on the north side of Dublin. I can give six examples of cases in the past six weeks where the health service has dismally failed to meet the requirements the public should expect. Only this week I met a woman who is 71 years of age and who has been waiting five weeks for a cataract operation. She is almost blind. She finally got an appointment two weeks ago but then it was cancelled at short notice and she will not get another one for a month. I had another case of a seriously ill 82 year old woman who was brought into the accident and emergency department. She had to wait two days on a trolley before she was admitted. I had a case of a pensioner with leukaemia and a blood clotting disorder who was ordered to be admitted immediately after an ECG in Beaumont Hospital. She had to go to the accident and emergency department where she waited 34 hours before being admitted. Another case is that of a woman with a two inch cavity in her skull who is waiting for neurosurgery. She has been told her case is not urgent and she will have to wait years for attention. An adult who is seeking to get his or her first referral to an ENT consultant in the Mater Hospital will have to wait 19 months.
When the Minister responded to the publication of this report he said there was nothing new in it. If he is serious that there is nothing new in this catalogue of cases he must accept that the health services on the north side have collapsed and that we are failing to deliver to a standard that is acceptable in 2001 when the Celtic tiger is supposed to be delivering great opportunities. They are not being delivered to people in their declining years who need care.
That survey I carried out over a period of two months shows the reality of under-investment in the service. There has been a 20% increase in the number of people over 65 years of age on the north side of Dublin in the past decade. During that period we have seen a decline in the number of public beds available to treat them. Not surprisingly, waiting lists for public surgery have soared. They are up 45% in Beaumont Hospital and the Mater Hospital in the past three years. Almost 60% of those on the waiting lists in those two hospitals must wait more than the time assigned by the Government as the standard that should be met. One in six patients stay in casualty departments in excess of 24 hours waiting for treatment. Some 30% of cases which are designated as urgent by the triage nurse when they are admitted cannot be seen within four hours. Nursing staff is turning over at a phenomenal rate. There is a staff turnover of 25% across those hospitals and that rises to 30% in casualty departments. People are leaving because they are stressed out as they cannot deliver a service to the professional standards required.
There is a serious problem of inequity and a two-tier system. The survey I did showed that private patients receive 60% more elective surgery treatments than public patients in the northside hospitals, although private patients are a smaller part of the population and they have lower health needs against any standard. The two tier health service is alive and well and thriving.
We must have a clear commitment to a strategic plan to deal with these issues. It is not enough to have stop gap measures, such as those the Minister announced this year where he is taking nursing home beds from a system on the north side. There is a 43% shortage of nursing home beds per head of population compared to the rest of the health board area. Yet the Minister will take away the few available nursing home beds and assign them to hospital work. We need serious investment in this system. This study includes a set of realistic proposals, many of which could be achieved in the short term. Rather than the Minister saying there is nothing new in it, I would like to see action on some of these practical proposals by people working at the coalface.
