paddyor wrote:Oldschool wrote:Slaintecare Report.
51 pages of political aspirations.
In other words how to waste the taxpayer's money.
How about sorting out the ongoing waste first.
Example - We spending a fortune to the private hospitals at the moment.
What are we getting for that money.
We were told that the public hospitals were going to be used to handle COVID and the private hospitals would look after the rest.
Larry Goodman must be laughing all the way to the bank and not for the first time on public largesse.
What is the point of trying to force Consultants to take the A Contract.
Sort out their insurance costs first by legislating for claim costs.
The politicians solutions is to publish Slaintecare and then hand it over to the DOH and HSE to implement it.
Does anyone believe that is going to work.
The failure to advise the general public to wear face masks is a disgrace, particularly at this point in time given
A. The HSE has cornered the market for medical standard masks and you couldn't get one even if you wanted to.
B. That restrictions are being eased and there is a likely to be a rise in cases, face masks would reduce the risk of transmission.
Are the HSE aware that, if the wearing of facemasks reduces the rate of transmission then the demand on the health system will be reduced also IE less cases, less deaths.
Haven't read Slaintecare but 51 pages of bi-partisan policy goals is generally a good place to start. Figure out where you want to go and get everyone on board.
I think 120m per month for access to 4k hospital beds and staffing is a steal tbqh. That's a 40% increase in hospital beds for 1.5bn a year. Not sure of the ICU gain. They've had to refund health insurance so are in all likelihood losing money like every other business out there.
I think face masks will be a disaster. I've had people brushing by me like they're invincible. And it'll likely lead to increased touching of the face.
Maybe I'm just being old and cynical but when politicians vote in favour of spending a lot of money and don't query why we are where we are (before COVID) then I hear alarm bells, let's just throw money at the problem and say to the public "look we are going to spend xbn over ten years etc etc" that's two elections away and a lot can and has happened in the meantime.
We can have this discussion again in ten years time.
To be more precise - we've forked out 120m per month, what have we used the asset for, an insurance policy basically.
Which wasn't the stated reason for forking out 120m in the first place.
Would you prefer somebody brushing by you who isn't wearing a face mask because that's happening too.
The CMO and his team are basically treating the general population as if they are imbeciles (or at least with average IQs significantly lower that the rest of the EU's citizens) .
Some of them are but the majority aren't and will be quite able to put on, wear and take off face masks quite safely with a bit of practice. And now is the time to do it with the community R very low.
By way of explanation-
There are a number of Rs not just one.
The R in the Nursing and Care homes was multiples of 1 and may still be above 1 but dropping.
The R in the Health Worker Community must also be high if not greater than 1.
The R in other known clusters (meat factories for example) must also be quite high.
The cluster cases should be containable and unlikely to feed to any great extent into the general community.
The CMO and his team know the precise numbers, they know the situation with testing and any accuracy/reliability issues.
The other indicators are the number of people in hospital and ICU.
It also seems that now might be a good time to develop a little app which people could use assess there own vulnerability and perhaps get some general advice from said app.
A little bit like the BMI calculation which in fact would be one aspect of the app(given what has been pointed out by others)
Questions like - Height, Weight, Age, Sex, are you type 1 Diabetic, are you type 2 Diabetic and similar questions which are relevant COVID risk factors, is your job sedentary and so on.