Minister urged to meet CUH management while in Cork for Ard Fheis

A Cork TD has called for the health minister to meet with Cork University Hospital management while attending her party’s Ard Fheis in the area this weekend.

Nine Cork University Hospital clinical directors recently asked the Taoiseach to order an independent assessment of staffing shortages, echoing concerns by the hospital’s CEO in a letter to HSE management earlier this year.

Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, a Fine Gael TD, has publicly criticised the hospital, saying that it has hired twice as many people as accounted for in the budget.

Fine Gael TDs will spend this weekend in Cork for their Ard Fheis, which is being held at University College Cork, just minutes away from the hospital.

Social Democrat TD Liam Quaide recently raised the ongoing situation in CUH in the Dáil, calling for the minister to meet with the hospital’s clinical directors and CEO.

He said: “In 2013, my brother and I accompanied our father through the emergency department at UHL two weeks before he died. It was the most harrowing experience of my life.

“My father endured a prolonged, nightmarish ordeal on a trolley, the lowest point of which was when we had to use his coat as a makeshift blanket.

“In May of last year, my elderly mother had a similar experience in the same hospital.

“Those experiences were 12 years apart, and Fine Gael has been in government throughout that time and longer.” He said that political leadership requires humility as well as capability and decisiveness, and said that “humility has been entirely lacking in the Minister's treatment of CUH.

“The Minister's treatment of CUH is damaging patient safety and staff morale. She is also damaging her own party in Cork.

“How many of the thousands of CUH staff and their families will vote for Fine Gael in 2029 if she continues depriving their hospital of staff and trashing it for supposed underperformance?” he asked.

Mr Quaide mentioned the party’s Colm Burke, saying he has long championed neurological services and asking how he explains “20 specialist neurorehabilitation beds lying idle in Blarney because the Minister has not funded the staff?

“How does one of her Ministers of State, Jerry Buttimer, explain to his constituents why a superb outpatient facility on the Curraheen Road remains unused because she will not fund the relocation of CUH's fracture clinic?

“Both of those services would substantially ease pressure on CUH,” he said.

“The clinicians and managers at CUH are not the Minister's political enemies,” he concluded, calling on her to meet with them, commission the independent staffing assessment they have requested and address the staffing shortages.