'We said thank you to Joe from the ladies of Ireland' – Louth breastcare provider on Joe Duffy's last show
Alison along with Caroline Davis from Caroline's Breastcare in Carlow were invited to the RTE studios for Joe's last show as they had featured on Liveline in May 2024 when Joe gave them a platform to speak against HSE proposals to cut funding allowances for women who had breast cancer.
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The Journal
3 hours ago
- The Journal
HSE chief admits waiting lists for assessments for children with disabilities will get worse
THE HEAD OF the Health Service Executive (HSE) has said he is 'hugely' concerned at growing waiting lists for disabled children seeking vital health assessments, and admitted the crisis will get worse. Bernard Gloster acknowledged a 'significant challenge' in tackling the crisis, with more than 15,000 children with serious disabilities waiting to access their legal right to assessments. When asked if the crisis was 'going to get worse before it got better', Gloster said 'yes'. 'Until we get extra capacity and until we reform the legislation, we are going to be challenged,' the HSE chief said. 'It would be very wrong of me to say anything different to people across the country, it would be untruthful to do that,' he told reporters in Limerick. The HSE predicts that the children's assessment waiting lists will increase to beyond 25,000 by the end of this year. After meeting Cara Daramody, a fourteen year old campaigner for the rights of children with disabilities, Gloster pledged that the HSE will advertise tenders for assessments to the private clinicians, to try and tackle the problem. Prior to the meeting, Cara Darmody, accompanied by her father Mark Darmody, called out the government via the HSE for breaching current legislation requiring it to provide health and education needs assessments for children with disabilities. Ms Darmody said children had been left to 'rot' on the waiting lists and urged Gloster to act fast to rescue the waiting list backlog for the vital assessments. Ms Darmody, who led a 50-hour protest outside the Dail last month highlighting the crisis, said she gave Gloster 'crucial information that totally contradicts the myth that capacity has been reached in the system in relation to the number of psychologists available to assess autistic children'. She said that she also informed the HSE chief that she is aware of 'private' clinicians who have sought to help reduce assessment waiting lists but who have been delayed in doing so by bureaucracy. Bernard Gloster pictured with activist Cara Darmody and her father Mark. Brendan Gleeson Brendan Gleeson Ms Darmody claimed she knows of at least one private clinician who could have 'eradicated' the AON waiting list in her home county of Tipperary county over the last 12 months, by performing an additional 220 AONs, had they been given the opportunity. She said the clinician had applied for a HSE Assessment Tender last October, 'but only got confirmation a month ago' that they had been accepted. Ms Darmody questioned 'why in the middle of a national crisis did it take eight months', and she accused the government of not acting fast enough on the waiting lists. Advertisement Gloster said this evening he was 'taken aback' at the details presented to him by Cara Darmody and Mark Darmody. Commentating on the alleged eight-month wait for the provision of the assessment tender, Gloster said: 'I have to say, it can happen, we are a very big organisation and we have to have rules and systems, and they, by their nature, can become bureaucratic.' 'I'm the first to put my hands up and say, that's for us to do better.' 'I don't think that my own people are doing anything bad or wrong, but it is for us to better, we are paid public servants and Cara and her Dad are not.' Gloster said, going forward, he would try to 'tighten the timeline' on assessment tenders applications by the private sector. He acknowledged that 'in the short-term' the HSE required 'help' from the private system to help reduce the assessment waiting lists. 'In the next few weeks we are going to redesign the specification of private sector provision to help us provide assessment of need,' Gloster said. 'We are going to widely advertise and promote it, so that if there are suitably qualified clinicians who can conduct an assessment of need, and who are qualified and registered to do so, and are safe to do so, then there will be no issue with us using that additional capacity,' he said. 'Even if it possibly reduced the timeline for a couple of hundred (children), then it would be a really productive thing.' Gloster said: 'If you apply for an assessment of need, you are entitled to it in law, you should be able to get it.' The Limerick health service boss said other 'challenges' existed beyond the assessments, including timelines over children's access to 'therapeutic support and intervention'. 'The amount of therapists we have in Ireland that are available to us is limited, but the government are making some really good interventions to increase the supply,' he said. Gloster said that Cara and Mark Darmody's 'anecdotal evidence' of a possible reduction in the waiting lists may exist in the private system, their arguments to investigate it further was 'legitimate and appropriate'. Gloster acknowledged that it had been 'a while' since the HSE had 'updated' its 'framework' of assessment providers, 'so, therefore, there is nothing to loose and everything to gain' by investigating potential capacity in the private system. 'If (it is) proven that there is capacity out there that isn't being used, we'll be delighted that more that can be done, because it means that we can immediately enter into arrangements with professionals to buy additional services to support our own (services),' Mr Gloster said. Ms Darmody described their meeting as 'extremely successful'. 'I got what I wanted from the meeting, which was for Mr Gloster to look into the issue and to start looking for solutions nationally, and in my own county Tipperary, and possibly internationally,' Ms Darmody said. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
Irish Times
7 hours ago
- Irish Times
Almost €100m spent on companies that use HSE facilities and staff to cut waiting lists after hours
Close to €100 million has been spent in just over two-and-a-half years on engaging external companies that use HSE -owned facilities and equipment after normal working hours – in many cases employing existing health service staff – to reduce public waiting lists. A report for Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill , published on Tuesday night, reveals 83 serving or former health staff are acting as directors in 148 companies providing what are known as insourcing and outsourcing arrangements to reduce waiting lists. It says 23 of these company directors are serving HSE personnel. About 500,000 instances of care were provided from the beginning of 2023 to the first quarter of this year. . READ MORE At the same time more than 13 million instances of care were provided by the HSE during core working days. HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster , who drew up the report, is to tell an Oireachtas committee on Wednesday that the figures suggest that 'in waiting-list management we have developed an over-reliance on insourcing to supplement core activity'. 'Insourcing by its nature carries risks and having assessed these I have agreed with the Minister and the Department [of Health] the need to take a series of steps which firstly reduce those risks and increase safeguards and secondly which removes our dependency on insourcing,' he is expected to say. He is to say that the HSE has carried out a review covering a 27-month period, taking in 2023/2024 and the first quarter of this year, to identify the scale of the dependency the health service has on insourcing and on outsourcing. Mr Gloster will define insourcing as the practice of engaging external companies or third-party providers to deliver services often outside of normal working hours using HSE-owned facilities and equipment. 'In many cases, these providers may employ or subcontract staff who are already directly employed by the HSE, effectively re-engaging internal staff through a separate commercial arrangement, typically at premium rates,' he is expected to say. 'It is not the use of standard overtime within employment contract arrangements of existing staff, which is a different form of insourcing.' [ National Treatment Purchase Fund seeks assurances from all hospitals that rules of waiting-list schemes being followed ] Following a number of controversies over insourcing arrangements, in April the Minister asked the HSE to examine on a national basis the scale and dependency of the health service on the practice. Last September an HSE internal audit revealed that two companies which received more than €1.5 million between them in contracts awarded by University Hospital Limerick without a competitive procurement process were owned or part-owned by employees at the facility. In May an internal report drawn up within a hospital run by Children's Health Ireland said there were 'serious concerns about the prudent and beneficial management' of National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) funding in relation to a series of clinics run by one consultant. Mr Gloster is expected to tell the Oireachtas Committee on Health that overall €1.1 billion was spent over the period between insourcing and outsourcing – which involves buying care from the private sector. Much work in this area is carried out by the NTPF. He will say about €830 million was spent between insourcing and outsourcing over the period in acute settings, with the bulk being spent on outsourcing arrangements. 'Within acute settings €739 million of the spend is outsourcing and this ranges from private hospital care to private ambulances to laboratory products. That is to say not all of the outsourcing is for waiting-list management,' he is to say 'Within acute settings between €71 million and €91 million appears to be insourcing.' The NTPF, which will receive about €230 million in exchequer funding this year, is expected to say about 30 per cent of its focus is on insourcing. It is to say it only makes payments in relation to specific named patients who have been on a public waiting list and then only on receipt of detailed invoices from public hospitals confirming that care is completed and the patient discharged. The NTPF is also expected to say payments are only made to hospitals and never to individual consultants or hospital staff members.
Irish Daily Mirror
9 hours ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
27 men fitted with 'gold standard' 'bionic penises' at estimated cost of €500k
A total of 27 men have been fitted with bionic penises as a treatment for erectile dysfunction in public hospitals during the past four years at a cost which could amount to around €500,000, new figures have revealed. The surgically-implanted devices, which are also known as penile prostheses, can be manually inflated to simulate an erection and allow a male patient to regain sexual function. The most common model is a three-piece inflatable penile prosthesis (3p-IPP), which consists of an abdominal reservoir, a scrotal pump, and dual cylinders implanted in the spongy tissue of the penis. A total of eight patients were fitted with these devices in acute hospitals run by the Health Service Executive (HSE) last year, bringing the number of procedures to 27 in the past four years. The figures do not include elective or voluntary hospitals. The HSE could not provide details relating to the cost of the treatment, but private clinics in the UK advertise prices exceeding €17,500, suggesting that the cost of the 27 procedures could amount to just under €500,000. Records released by the HSE under freedom of information laws show that the patients who received penile prostheses in public acute hospitals since 2021 had been diagnosed with 'failure of genital response' or 'impotence of organic origin'. The Irish Mirror's Crime Writers Michael O'Toole and Paul Healy are writing a new weekly newsletter called Crime Ireland. Click here to sign up and get it delivered to your inbox every week The surgical implantation of these devices is typically considered a last resort where all other treatment options have failed, and the cause of patients' erectile dysfunction can include trauma, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and prostate removal. A study published in the Irish Medical Journal previously reported that 86 per cent of patients who had undergone the treatment in Irish hospitals between 2008 and 2017 had said they were 'satisfied' with the outcome. However, a number of post-operative complications were reported by other respondents, and 13 had to undergo at least one revision procedure due to device failure, erosion, or infection. The causes of device failure reported by patients included kinking of tubing, disconnection of a tube from the abdominal reservoir, and migration of the reservoir within the body. The study described the 3p-IPP device as the 'gold standard' surgical treatment option. This is activated by squeezing and releasing a pump fitted in the patient's scrotum, which moves fluid from a reservoir in the abdomen into the penis, creating an erection. The latest figures show that 11 men underwent the procedure in acute hospitals in 2021, and a total of eight received the treatment in 2022 and 2023 combined, while another eight were fitted with the devices last year.
