Fat bonuses for the Professor as children languish on waiting lists
As the HSE fails to meet the needs of children like Jamie Murphy who are waiting and waiting for life saving operations every day, others who work in the HSE are enjoying exorbitant salaries and even better bonuses for their efforts.
It beggars belief that Prof Brendan Drumm has penned a five-page letter documenting why (in his opinion) he should be paid his €70,000 bonus for doing a ‘good job’ in 2007.
Firstly who gets a paid a bonus for doing a good job these days? Secondly, does he really think he is doing a good job? A blind person could see that the health service he operates is substandard and that every day the Professor is failing men, women and children in this country.
Little Jamie Murphy of Graiguenamanagh is only one person who we know of who had to travel abroad to have life saving surgery for scoliosis because the Professor and his colleagues did not deem her imminent slow and painful death urgent enough to be operated on immediately. Thankfully, there are more compassionate people in charge in London (who by the way don’t get paid half as much as the Professor) who took one look at Jamie and said what some consultants here had said - she needed the procedure as soon as possible or else....
What person in their right mind can stand over a system that can allow this service to continue and then pat themselves on the back and say they are doing a good job and offer themselves €70,000 as a bonus?
It is outrageous that the Minister for Health Mary Harney would not encourage the Professor to refuse this bonus but instead she washed her hands of the issue and said that he had done a good job that year and she was not going to get involved in contractual issues of the staff! It really clarifies why our health system is as inefficient as it is, when the boss won’t deal with ‘contractual issues’!
This year alone we lost 534 special needs assistants from classrooms - many of which were considered vital to the child’s development. If any one of these positions were re-instated, it would be better than none. The Minister’s view is very short-sighted if she thinks that cutting funding for people with disabilities will save money, as in the long run, if these people do not get the care they need now - they will need increased and more expensive care in the future that will cost the State dearly. Cutting carer’s allowance will see more people returned to residential care - ultimately costing the State - it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where this is going.
The bottom line is that if the Professor was doing as a good a job as he thought, he would not have children on death’s door on waiting lists; he would not have people like Susie Long (whose anniversary was this week) dying because of delayed cancer diagnosis; he would not have children with disabilities in mainstream education without special needs assistants.
But hey - give him his bonus - maybe he’s a nice person....
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