Ireland Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow Parts 3 and 4
. . . The Bad News
Meanwhile, despite all the good news, there was a distinctly dark side to life in Ireland in 2006, news that has grown much darker over four years with the economic contraction and the bursting of the real estate bubble.
The once-vaunted health system (acclaimed when the now-defunct Irish Sweepstakes financed Irish hospitals) was in serious trouble then and the situation has worsened as the euros have dried up.
On my visits, a number of people shared anecdotes about how friends and relatives had gone to emergency rooms and were kept on gurneys for more than twenty four hours before they even saw a doctor. Even then it was rarely an M.D. but what we would call a physician’s assistant.
In 2005, only five of fifty four hospitals were rated by the government as hygienically “good,” a figure that most were able to improve in 2006, but the hospitals were still woefully behind most international standards, a condition that has been exacerbated in the last few years.
New hospitals were still being built by the cash-flush government through 2007 but some were opening without beds! . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/)
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