Capacity and consultants urgently required

The IHCA’s pre-Budget submission 2018 had a very simple message, although it came packaged in some far from simple analysis of the dire state of our public health service. Reinvest in health, expand Budget 2018, address our capacity deficits and ensure we have sufficient numbers of consultants. What certainly added to the document this year was the somewhat stark ‘granular’ information gleaned from consultants on how the insufficient resources currently available are affecting care on the ground. For example, when highlighting that the number of elective surgeries have dramatically decreased from 187,000 in 2012 to 86,000 in 2016 (a fall…