Winter could break ailing health service

THE outbreak of the dreaded antibioticresistant superbug known as CPE represents an enormous challenge to our creaking health service.

To that end, Health Minister Simon Harris has convened the National Public Health Emergency Team to devise a strategy to deal with the potentially fatal bug that is not just responsible for mortality rates exceeding 40% but can have a devastating impact on hospitals.

However, our hospital system with its hallmarks of A&E overcrowding, waiting lists and staffing shortages is already illequipped to deal with anything as severe as the rising prevalence of a superbug so virulent that it causes beds to be closed due to infection control and the postponement of vital surgeries.

Add to this Doomsday scenario is the threat of a flu epidemic arriving from Australia and New Zealand. As reported by the Irish Daily Mail, emergency medicine consultant Dr Fergal Hickey says that a strain of the H3N2 virus is heading our way, and likely to cause the same havoc as in Australia where the numbers needing hospital treatment for influenza doubled from the previous year.

The strain on the health service could be intolerable in the months ahead. But while we can trust our hard-pressed doctors and nurses to do their utmost to care for the sick over a demanding winter, the question is for how much longer our health service can lurch from one crisis to the next, with a series of ad-hoc measures that do nothing more than patch up a series of underlying problems.

CPE represents a real health emergency but if the threat to patients is to be minimised then the Government’s response should be designed against a backdrop of a streamlined health service, not one that is dysfunctional or powered by chaos.