Now is time to make voices heard on hospital

This Saturday marks a crucial day in the recent history of Our Lady’s Hospital Navan when it is expected that large numbers of people will turn out for a public rally in the town to protest at the continuing and debilitating cutbacks in the services it has provided to this community over many decades. There is an imperative on every man, woman and child to come out on the day so that the strong feelings evident in private conversations throughout the county can now be expressed in a public forum in such a manner as to leave government representatives in no doubt about the reaction to the damaging measures introduced by the HSE over the past few years. If there is to be any hope of a restoration of some of the services which the hospital has lost, and the retention of remaining services, such as they are, the voice of the people must be heard loud and clear. All of the work of opposing these damaging cutbacks has been left so far to a relatively small group of people. That must end. Each individual in the county who has past experience of the services of the hospital, or who has an interest in keeping a fully functioning and adequately staffed and funded hospital, must live up to their own responsibility. There will be no excuse for leaving the matter to other individuals. This public protest planned for this Saturday should not be labelled as reflecting narrow interests, political or otherwise. It is a cross-community effort and the voices of those present must be listened to by those who have the power to save the hospital for future generations. There is a good reason why those in power at high political levels in government feel so helpless about hospital cutbacks - it is because they are on their knees. They have largely given up on a decent health service for the community, shifting the responsibility over to the Health Service Executive, and then bleating and hand wringing about how awful the HSE is for implementing the cuts. We might have had more respect for them if they had come out publicly and attempted to justify the cutting back of services. What is about to happen to frontline health services in a county with 160,000 people is nothing short of scandalous. Is Our Lady’s Hospital about to be turned into a community hospital and a day care facility? It looks like it, if the bureaucrats and their political masters get their way. The recent announced winding down of all acute surgical services in Navan, including day and five-day surgery, will inevitably have a knock-on effect on all general surgical and medical service in Our Lady’s. Unless we are badly mistaken, that will lead to the presence of a community hospital with no acute services and perhaps just a minor injuries unit. Further down the line looms the closure of the hospital’s accident and emergency department and medical assessment unit. The prospect of deep and widespread cuts in public services in the upcoming Budget is a real one. Because of the banking crisis, and the abject failure of regulators and political overseers to see it coming, many people are about to see the quality of their lives change. People who depend on a decent health service will be told, in the glib words of the commentators about TINA (there is no alternative). The cry will go up that we are all in this together, emanating often from the ranks of former political leaders who speak comfortably from the padded armchairs of various pensions paid out of the public purse. It is a pity that we are to be deprived of the opportunity of a General Election. At least that might have given us an avenue to vent our feelings about the state of the country. The next best available chance to do that will, for Meath people at least, be in Navan on Saturday.