John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I draw the Leader's attention to two related health issues, which I ask that he bring to the attention of the Minister for Health, and to another issue which needs to be discussed. I will start with the third matter. I was unable to contribute to the debate on the HSE report into the Savita Halappanavar tragedy. In this regard, I would like to repeat a point I made a number of months ago. The number of obstetricians per head of population in the western region of this country is the lowest in Ireland and western Europe. Ireland is firmly anchored at the bottom of the league table in terms of the number of obstetricians per head of population. The next lowest is the Netherlands, which has approximately twice as many as Ireland and has a lower birth rate than we have.

Without attempting to conduct our own private inquest on what was a personal tragedy thrust into the public light, I ask Senators and Ministers to reflect that every time they read the account of a case like this in which reference is made to the words "registrar", "specialist registrar", "senior house officer", "house officer" and "intern" they should replace it with the word "trainee" and then consider how much sense what they read makes. Every major decision about a sick person should be made by a fully-trained specialist. This is not possible because of our current staffing levels. Lest anybody will say this is because of the exorbitant salaries of Irish consultants, I would remind them that the system began at a time when Irish consultants effectively worked for free, making their money in private practice and donating their public service. This was the type of system that tended to apply before the common contract era in many of our voluntary hospitals. It is a structural problem dictated not by doctors but by the permanent government of the Civil Service and is something that needs to be fixed.

On health insurance, as a result of the issue I raised yesterday other facts have come to light. Incredibly, several insurance companies have taken the decision not to pay for a potentially life saving proven cancer treatment, including an insurance company that pays for homoeopathy, which is right up there with leprechauns and moonbeams as a treatment for anything. The reason given for this is that the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics, an agency of the Government, conducted a cost effective analysis on the drug and deemed it not to be cost effective. The Minister, wisely and humanely, chose to ignore that advice and to make the drug available. However, the State, its citizens and taxpayers are funding an agency of the State to generate data which is then used by private health insurers to deny people treatment, thrusting the cost of that treatment on the State which paid for the analysis in the first instance.