Health Campaign Launches Limerick Website

limerick | miscellaneous | press release Wednesday March 04, 2009 13:15 by CRPHS, Limerick - Campaign for a Real Public Health Service limerickhealth at gmail dot com 0868064801

The Limerick branch of the Campaign for a Real Public Health Service (CRPHS) have launched a new website, www.limerickhealth.blogspot.com, to highlight health cuts and scandals in Limerick and help build a campaign against them.

The people of Limerick and the country have been left in the dark about the cuts in our health service. The HSE have been allowed get away with implementing cutbacks, and overseeing crisis after crisis. It has only been health staff, their unions and occasional brave patients who have shone a light on the crisis and cuts in our hospitals

We want to encourage patients who experience long waits, overcrowding and cuts to come forward with their stories. We also want health workers in Limerick to speak out, email us updates on ward clousures, understaffing etc. in full confidentiality to limerickhealth@gmail.com so we can highlight the cuts.

According to the ‘About us’ section on the site “The CRPHS is a national group which campaigns throughout the country against all the health cuts, the privatisation of health care and for a top quality public health service. This would mean… a worse crisis at Limerick's Regional Hospital, which cannot cope. It is about saving money, not saving lives.”

Our health service is under attack. A further €1.1bn have just been announced, on top of the already crisis situation. In Limerick that will mean ward closures, cancelled surgery as well as attacks on nurses and other health staff pay and conditions. This is in addition to the plans to send up to an extra 25,000 A&E patients from Ennis and Nenagh hospitals into the Regional. These cuts must be opposed, the CRPHS, through our new site, want to assist people in getting active in defense of our health service. We must go from anger to action, and defeat the governments health policies of cuts, centralisation and privatisation.

Along this theme, the site is currently running articles on how Limerick's Regional Hospital has had to send patients with the life threatening blood disorder, haemochromatosis, to Nenagh Hospital due to a lack of capacity in Limerick and on the claim by doctors in Nenagh that the HSE has consciously understated the number of patients who will have to travel from there to Limerick from April first. According to the Nenagh GPs, and doctor in the Hospital, Christine O'Malley, 3,700 patients use Nenagh A&E between 8pm & 8am, and from April first these, along with around 5,000 from Ennis A&E will be sent into the Regional, soon to be followed by thousands more from July on when the A&E is fully downgraded.