I spent most of today travelling to and from Dublin, hence no posts until now. And I’m only back in the house after watching the Champions League Final with friends, one of whom is a fanatical Man. Utd. fan, so of course I had to side with him. Also Chelsea have taken a lot of the fun out of soccer by trying to buy victory. So I’m delighted with the result.
Anyway, what I really wanted to comment on was cancer services. Mary Harney has come up with this “Centres of Excellence” plan. That in itself seems to be a good thing to me – I used to work in a small cancer hostpital called St. Anne’s, which was in Ranelagh, Dublin, in my summers when I was at school, so I see the value in concentrating services so that patients have a higher level of care. What I don’t get is why all the centres of excellence in Ireland should be south of the Dublin-Galway road. Surely Sligo is ideally placed to be a centre of excellence? It’s easier to access than Galway for someone coming from Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, parts of Mayo and more – basically the entire northeastern part of the country. Concentration of services may be good, but it’s not good unless they are concentrated in the right place. And UCHG in Galway is already overloaded – I’ve been a patient there myself and I have seen at first hand how the staff will do everything they can for patients, but they are simply under-financed, under-resourced, and under-equipped. Why put more on them, and expect them to deal with patients from the entire northwest, when we could have a centre in Sligo, ideally placed to deal with them? I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
I need to go and collapse into my bed now.
Filed under: Politics, Random Thoughts, Soccer | Tagged: Cancer, Man. Utd., Sligo
