Stephen Donnelly orders HSE to hold 'on the ground' meetings with Disabilities Minister
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The Health Minister has directly intervened to order the HSE to hold 'on the ground' meetings with the Disabilities Minister amid concerns about how services for children are being delivered.
Minister of State Anne Rabbitte has suggested that senior HSE officials blocked her from holding individual meetings with those managing services for children with disabilities across the country as they feared what she might ask and "the lack of control" they would have over such meetings.
Minister Stephen Donnelly contacted HSE chief executive Paul Reid after the reported that Ms Rabbitte was being continuously prevented from holding one-to-one meetings with each of the nine CHO disabilities managers and their teams working on the ground.
It is understood the HSE has now agreed to allow these monthly meetings to go ahead. Ms Rabbitte said it was "regrettable" and "unfortunate" that her position had been "undermined" and that a senior minister had to get involved.
She first wrote to each of the nine disability managers in November seeking individual updates rather than joint monthly progress meetings on what her office has described as "one of the most fundamental changes across the health service in how we deliver care to children".
However, correspondence obtained by the revealed that the HSE told the Minister that these meetings were “not operationally feasible”.
Ms Rabbitte said she had contacted each of the nine managers and a number had responded to confirm their attendance at these individual meetings. However, these were then stopped at a "very senior level" within the HSE.
"They believed it was not feasibly operational to have people away from their jobs but yet at the same time we could have them away to sit at a five-hour meeting. So, I actually thought I was doing everybody a favour not to be bored out of their tree listening to everybody else's problems. I'd do it one by one. But it got stopped."