Strange but true

Dr Garrett FitzGerald writes that it is getting harder and harder to square one particular circle. Health insurance is rising, subscribers are leaving, but we keep on building private hospitals

Some circles can’t be squared on the Island of Saints and Scholars.The country is bust and the subscribers are leaving the health insurance companies, probably at least at the rate of 5-6 per cent per annum. Yet we are building private hospitals to beat Banagher.
The latest addition reported by Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times this week is a boutique establishment in Sligo to add to the two new hospitals in Cork city, one each in Limerick, Letterkenny, Tullamore and Waterford.
In recent years we got Beacon, Hermitage and Galway Clinic. Before that, ‘de Bons’ in Tralee, ‘de Bons’ in Galway, ‘de Bons’ in Dublin, de ‘real’ Bons in Cork, Aut Even in Kilkenny, Blackrock Clinic, Mater Private, Clane General Hospital, St Francis Mullingar, Shanakiel, St Vincent’s Private, Mount Carmel, St Joseph’s Sligo and St Joseph’s Raheny.
Forgive my omission if I have left out your local emporium of the Little Sisters of the VHI. Yet to come are at least five co-located hospitals, each with 90- 110 beds planned. Twenty-nine hospitals, so far — and counting. If you know of more in the pipeline, please email me.
Cancer treatment units
Several of the newer outfits, as well as many of the old, are offering oncology and radiotherapy services. To my approximate knowledge, at least 12 establishments in the ‘private’ country have or will have cancer treatment units with radiotherapy. This contrasts alarmingly with Professor Brendan Drumm’s/ Professor Tom Keane’s public country which will have only eight, and only four of these will have radiotherapy. Almost all of the outfits listed have wall-to-wall state of the art CT/PET/MRI and carpets.
There is a big choice of consultants too, far, far more than in your local stay-overnight-in-casualty centre of excellence. For instance at Mount Carmel Hospital in Churchtown, not by any means half as posh as some of the aforementioned disease basilicas, they can offer you your pick of 17 orthopaedic surgeons, 13 eye doctors and 11 gynaecologists on or before the twelfth day of Christmas.
But it looks like the Hermitage is the best bet for head stuff – they have six neurosurgeons on the team. If you have a Darwinian problem, even lovely, lowly Clane General Hospital can give you the choice of two embryologists. Some of the boutique hospitals aren’t much more than cosmetic malls.
To see an orthopaedic surgeon in a private clinic is worth the fee in itself. You go into a plush waiting room, read next month’s Vogue for two minutes and then you get to see the man/woman whom you only booked last Friday and you can be on the table for a new knee before the flood recedes in Cork. Makes a change from the public clinic you’ve waited a year or two for and where there is standing room only with 140 or so fellow long-sufferers waiting to be seen in less than three hours and you get to go on the 2012 waiting list all being equal and you still alive if not exactly kicking. This is truly, the ‘Lourdes Experience’, not to be confused with Drogheda.
If however, you have an administrative condition, avoid all of the fancy places.
Go instead to the public system where you will have your choice of thousands and thousands.
Fasting and weak
I visited a friend, 78 years old, in a famous public hospital recently. He was a day-case. The trick was that he had to rise at 4-30a.m. and be driven 48 miles to be checked in at 8am sharp. Fasting and weak, he duly made it in time. The reception desk at the hospital isn’t manned until nine o’clock, and there was no sign or person to tell him where to check-in.
Eventually, he found the hidden area and waited with 40 others for his turn. He was called to a desk in the same area and a clerk asked him his personal details which she repeated far from sotto voce, without eye contact, so that everybody present soon knew he was there for a colonoscopy and his email address.
When he had told me this story, I called by the reception desk on my way out. There was no sign-post to check-in. The very nice lady confirmed for me that the desk is not manned until 9am and felt that there was no great need for a sign to let the patients know where to go. I nodded in the unbelieving mode. I was slightly afraid and made to make good my retreat.
But she needed to release her views on patients from down the country who came at that hour of the morning. I was the right man in the right place.
“Jesus almighty, you couldn’t please them. They do be driving theirselves into a pure state, especially the ould fellas and the most of ‘em wouldn’t be able to find a herd of cows in the next field if ‘twas the middle of summer. Sure doesn’t everyone know where the checking-in is? Tis only around the corner. Half of ‘em would get lost in their own kitchen. Don’t get me started on ‘em! They’d drive you stone mad!”
They’ll be holding hiring fairs for some of the new private hospitals soon. No doubt they will be looking at the cream of the public service, as usual. I’d say she has a great chance.
Today, Quinn health insurance subscription went up by 15 per cent. The rumour is that VHI will go up by more than 20 per cent in January.
Square that circle.