Letters to the Editor: Integrated healthcare is making a difference to older people
For Griffin's Hse's Programme Older Picture: About Persons, Icpop Istock Responding Article Care Are Integrated To Readers The Niamh
Regarding Niamh Griffin’s article ‘Older patients feel right at home with integrated healthcare’ (Irish Examiner, September 18): This is wonderful. My husband died recently after a long illness. He had to be hospitalised every few months mainly for IV antibiotics for chest infections.
He always came home weaker than he went in not due to the care he received but to the loneliness and isolation. He had mild dementia.
If this service had been available, life would have been so much easier for both of us.
At last, a practical approach to a very frustrating problem.
I am 69 years old with multiple health issues and limited mobility. I live alone following the death of my husband two years ago.
A former nurse with experience of care of the elderly, I have been appalled at the nightmare of ending up on a trolley in A&E on several occasions with health problems that could have been resolved in a system such as the one Niamh Griffin reported on in her article.
I won’t go on repeating the benefits of the system, but they speak for themselves.
The next step is to push for similar systems nationwide.
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I read in Tadgh McNally’s article (Irish Examiner, Thursday, September 14) that senior civil servants are to receive substantial increases to their already over-inflated salaries. They will even have them backdated.
The Government however can stand over increases to the pay of senior civil servants which are larger than one person with a disability receives from the State in one full year. There is something wrong with the priorities of a Government who can stand over these inequalities.
In 1950, the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin removed a pellet from my left eye, which had lodged there in an accident with an air gun.
Cataracts were removed from my eyes by the same hospital in 2018 and September 2023 — a trinity of goodness.
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the peace agreement between Israel and the PLO which became known as the Oslo Accords.
Arafat was in jubilant form, finally he and the PLO were recognised by Israel as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. It was as good as it was going to get.
Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, was elected as successor to Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority. The aging unpopular leader has lost the support of the street and is becoming more and more authoritarian. The Palestinian Authority is also seen to be doing Israel’s dirty security work. There have been no elections since 2006.
The asymmetry of power always meant the process was skewed in Israel’s favour, with the duplicitous support of the US.
As I sat watching 30 years ago I could not help thinking of another ‘land for peace’ agreement, when Michael Collins signed the Treaty. Similar to Rabin, he was a pragmatic soldier. Like Oslo, the Treaty was to be done in instalments and, like Rabin, Collins was assassinated by his own people.
Israelis celebrated the Jewish new year holiday, Rosh Hashanah, last weekend. Is it too much to expect that they will make peace with the Palestinians their new year’s wish?
Regarding Seán MacCárthaigh’s article ‘Transport Authority withheld almost €20m from operators of bus and rail services in 2022’ (IrishExaminer.com, September 17): The service failures are not all the companies’ fault.
They are victims of the National Transport Authority (NTA) making big promises that the companies cannot keep.
Staff shortages are not new, but the NTA insists on 24-hour services to be started. They insist on route changing and creating new services to replace others, which use more staff and vehicles.
They set schedules which have buses stopping for up to five minutes at a time to stay on target, then getting caught in traffic and being late and the companies being fined.
The are forcing one company to change the condition of service of their staff and staff are leaving because of this.
They order vehicles, 100 of them sitting in Broadstone Garage, but there are no chargers for them.
They are designing extremely dangerous bus stops and worse for the people of Cork, and they are using the same lines they fed us in Dublin. The designer of BusConnects said nothing could change in his design or everything would fail. We are at, I think, the fifth remodelling of it.
At least they cannot do too much damage to the railways as they must go on the rails. As in Dublin, they had buses going under bridges that were a metre too short for double deckers, and they have this strange idea that everybody will cycle everywhere. or walk a kilometre to a bus stop. Great if you can, damned if you cannot.
No use of local knowledge and experience and it shows.
The people at fault are the NTA and the Minister for Transport, even the Department of Transport, shies away from the NTA for fear of being tarred with the same brush.
Don’t mind the fancy presentations — they are brilliant at all that, just not particularly good at running the national transport system.