Emergency: Irish Hospitals in Chaos by Marie O'Connor

Our health service is in crisis. Millions are spent every year, yet people die waiting on trolleys in A&E units. When people need access to vital services, why are these being withdrawn?

Have you — or anyone you know — ever waited for an operation? Queued in casualty? Had a baby in hospital — or on the side of the road? Been denied access to care because you couldn’t afford it or because of where you live? Or maybe you are on the other side, working at the front line.
If so, this passionate, provocative polemic is for you. Emergency asks: why are our hospitals riddled with super bugs? Why do you need a license for a car wash but not for a hospital?

Lucidly written and impeccably researched by health analyst and longstanding activist Marie O’Connor, Emergency gets behind the spin, exposing a sprawling, chaotic, dysfunctional system, riven with vested interests and warring hierarchies.

The trolley waits in A&E, the waltz of medicine with litigation, the assembly line in the labour ward, the heart of darkness that was the Lourdes Hospital: it’s all here in our ‘world-class’ health service, where the power of organized medicine is paralleled only by the pervasive cancer of bureaucracy, where the overarching influence of corporations is equalled only by the supine weakness of the state.

With verve and humour, O’Connor interrogates the agendas that are driving privatization and centralization, the twin peaks of government policy today. Why are we building a four-speed Ireland? Why should a vote — or a life — in a non-urban area be worth less than one in a city? Why should medical care depend on the size of your wallet?

In a tough and uncompromising yet compassionate and understanding look at our hospitals, O’Connor asks: how did we get it so wrong and how can we put it right?
 

Emergency: Irish Hospitals in Chaos is available now from Amazon.com
 

About the Author

Marie O’Connor has been writing on health for twenty years. An award-winning journalist and broadcaster, her most recent book, Birth Tides, spoke strongly to women in Ireland and around the world. Press officer with the anti-Hanly Health Services Action Group, she writes an incisive and often biting column for the Northern Standard. Her work has been translated into a number of European languages.

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