Irish Socialized Health Care: Two-Hour Ambulance Waits

'A department without a heart,' is what advocacy group Patients Together calls Ireland's health department, which has presided over a cancer misdiagnosis fiasco that has galvanized the country in recent weeks.

In the latest scandal to hit the health services, it has emerged that after 3,000 mammograms were taken at the midlands Portlaoise Hospital, seven women were erroneously given the all-clear.

'Initially, we heard how human error caused the problem. This gave people a sense of relief. Then as the situation further evolved, we learned how there were problems with dirt, with 16-year-old machines' says Janette Byrne who founded the patients advocacy organization in response to how she and her mother were treated at Dublin hospitals....

Ironically, the cancer misdiagnosis scandal unfolded after the director of nursing at Portlaoise raised concerns about 10 'false positive' mammograms in August....

'Any sniff of cover-up in relation to cancer makes people angry,' says Byrne. 'People are angry that HSE officials are willing to sit on information that can cause death. The whole fact that women were waiting for results and they got the wrong results which delayed treatment makes people very angry.'

Byrne, who when she was a cancer patient in Dublin's Mater hospital ended up taking the service to court, is keen to emphasize that the latest furore is just one symptom of the well-advanced health service malaise....

'I was told I would be having chemotherapy after being treated for cancer of the lymph system. But while I was visualizing the cancer returning, I sometimes had a wait of three days and once nine days for chemotherapy. Although I was booked in for chemotherapy on a particular day, I had to ring up on the day and see if there was a bed available.'

Byrne's negative experience was revisited when she watched her mother spend three-and-a-half days on a trolley because of a bed shortage, which she considers is the worst problem in the health service....

'Sometimes, in Dublin even plastic chairs in Accident and Emergency departments are full and ambulances can't get people in hospital, so they have to wait too. God forbid there is ever a train crash or an emergency situation,' she says.

John Kidd, an ambulance driver, employed by Dublin Fire Brigade which operate 12 of 15 ambulances in the Dublin area for the HSE, also pinpoints the lack of beds in the system.

'If we arrive at a hospital where there are no beds, we can wait up to two hours to move a patient into the hospital while calls are coming in,' Kidd says.