It is a well-known fact that love has not been lost between HSE Chief Paul Reid and Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan.
While respecting Dr. Holohan, e is said to say, “You probably won’t see you going out for a pint, say so.”
However, the two Irish Covid-19-enabled frontmen are on the same path and are leaving medical services early. Dr. Holohan will retire next week and Mr. Reed will resign in December, but his five-year contract will not expire until May 2024.
But if Mr. Reed held up until 2024 and did his job right, he would see his power slowly diminish as decision-making returned from the center to the six local governments.
Reid and Dr. Holohan are one of the key official spills, including HSE Chief Operating Officer Anne O’Connor heading to VHI and Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ronan Glynn who attended EY’s consulting.
Where is the flight of so many people who were maneuvering medical service vessels through the Covid-19 and the end of the long-awaited two-tier system now open to the public?
When Reed was appointed in May 2019, the waiting list for inpatients was 68,765. Currently it is 79,690. When he took office, there were 556,411 outpatients on the waiting list, with the latest number being 624,444. And that’s due to this year’s € 350 million waiting list fund.
There was a Covid-19 hurricane and a cyberattack that blew away the plan.
The management of Covid-19 by HSE was to commercialize government and public health advice, and there were many conflicts behind the scenes. The main failure was probably the lack of early awareness of the risks to nursing homes. A major success was the deployment of vaccines, which are now an obstacle due to public malaise.
Reed reiterated that reforms in the use of electronic prescribing and telemedicine to make services more efficient were brought about during Covid-19 under his supervision.
The problem is that Covid-19 has slowed Sláintecare’s progress. Sláintecare is committed to providing universal health services that provide the right care at the right place, at the right time, at low cost or at no cost.
At the same time, HSE is addressing a worrying level of backlog that has accumulated over the last two years, flooding hospital emergency departments and wards despite extra beds.
He points to the expansion of community care programs aimed at reducing the burden on hospitals, caring for people with chronic illnesses and the frail elderly, and making progress by providing more diagnostic scans. Was seen. However, these services need to be built and fully staffed to achieve dramatic penetration.
There remains a big hurdle to secure staff. About 700 consultant posts are not filled and disability services are struggling.
The plan to divide the HSE into six regional authorities and return power to the region is overseen by Mr. Reed and Minister of Health Robert Watson. Anyone who takes over Reed will have the complex task of starting to implement it early next year before it goes live in 2024.
He or she also has much less power and autonomy as more decisions are returned to the area.
Reed undoubtedly recognizes the need for fresh energy to manage potentially charged transitions. His relationship with Health Minister Stephen Donnelly is said to be polite, but not warm.
The disagreement over HSE’s claim that the emergency department at Navan Hospital should be a 24-hour medical evaluation unit and a local injury unit that sends critically ill patients to Drogheda for safety reasons is an example of tension.
But that’s not the reason for his early departure.
A lot of knowledge remains for senior officials who are about to stop medical services.
Reed from Dublin, who currently lives in Carrick-On-Shannon, wants to spend more time with his son and young granddaughter Eisling in Texas.