It is no secret that there is bad blood between the Health Service Executive and the national news station NewsTalk Radio. It all started with on-air calls during the Your Call mid morning show to unwitting civil servants in an effort to embarrase them out of giving members of the public the run-around when ever they have a query or complaint. In response, the Health Service Executive pulled advertisements from the station, and a number of government ministers refused to give the station interviews. Now, the HSE have file a complaint to the Gardai after an investigative reporter managed to carry knives into St. Anne’s Day care centre in Roxboro last week, just two months after two psychological doctors were viciously stabbed at the centre. Reporter, Samantha Barry, managed to carry... Similar posts

I’m delighted… Brenda Power is not Joe Duffy - she thinks she is or is better than Joe…and as bad as some might think Duffy is he wouldn’t stoop to bullying civil servants and others live on air without prior knowledge that they would be on air. Her 10 o’clock ‘ring a civil servant live on air’ on behalf of a member of the public drives me fecking bonkers. And the last few days of HSE continuum have not got anyone anywhere. The Health Famine stuff on Wednesday - all day Wednesday - was soporific. Investigative journalism died somewhere on the way to Newstalks’s offices. But I suppose I should not be surprised. I’m sad that the station I listen to most is the one I now turn off the most.0+2=1 agrees. From today’s Irish...... Similar posts

The nurses dispute is set to escalate. Although it's the last thing the health service needs, the depth of disillusion and the low morale is so serious that nurses are voting with their feet-or their bleep in some cases. It is vital that every effort is made to resolve the knotty issues that have led to this dispute. The lethargy of the government is striking. Nurses, doctors, dentists, chiropodists have all tried to negotiate with the Health Service Executive without success but the nursing crisis must take top priority. Irish Congress of Trade Unions proposed the establishment of a Forum on Health but it's only recently that the Minister for Health decided to get going to set it up. Pity she was so slow. The Forum could have prevented the mess that the health service is experiencing... Similar posts

At times like these, one does not know whether to laugh or to cry:An accounting error by the Health Service Executive means it will have €56.4m less to spend in 2006, the Dáil heard tonight.Minister for Finance Brian Cowen told TDs during the Order of Business that he was informed last week that some funding earmarked for the HSE this year had already been spent in day-to-day expenses.As expected, Brian Cowen has pledged not to punish the Health Service Executive for their mistakes (as customers would do in a free market), but to reward them with more funds.Such a central contradiction can lead only to more waste and inefficiency. Ronald Reagan put it in his own way:The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the... Similar posts