Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
Frozen Peas vs Healthcare Meltdown
Here is a comparative example of how breast cancer assessment, diagnosis and treatment is supposed to work in a first world country, and yet utterly fails in Ireland:
On Wednesday, December 5th, American Susan Reynolds found a mass in her breast. In her own words,
When I discovered a very thick area in my breast I called the doctor. The next day I was in her office. A half hour after that I was in the diagnostic radiologist’s. A full afternoon and multiple stab wounds later we had a variety of samples of malignant tentacles of tissue that were on their way to the lab.
Yesterday, the 21st of December, 16 days later, Susan Reynolds was in surgery. Yesterday, SIXTY FOUR DAYS after first calling her GP about a lump in her breast, Al finally had access to the first step in assessment, a diagnostic ultrasound. And that was after an Irish blogstorm, radio talkshow coverage, local political intervention and a question to Mary Harney, the Minister for Health, in the Dail.
Susan Reynold’s internet support comes from friends and friends of friends, all Twitter users, who have started The Frozen Pea Fund to raise money for breast cancer research in Susan’s name. She didn’t need bloggers to get an appointment; she didn’t need a radio show to get testing; she didn’t need a congressional inquiry to get treatment. Her friends are free to show their support through fund raising for a charity that isn’t Susan Reynolds because Susan simply had access to the care and treatment she needed when she needed it.
At the rate we’re going here in Ireland, we won’t ever be raising goodwill funds as an act of support for someone’s cancer diagnosis. We’ll be raising lifesaving funds to send them abroad so they can get prompt and appropriate treatment.
I wish the best to both of these women. But the fact I am more confident about the long term prospects for the woman having a mastectomy in America than the woman having an ultrasound in Ireland speaks volumes – volumes – about the state of the HSE. This simply has to change. We can do better than this. We have to.
22 Dec 2007
| In: Activism + Crankypants + Ireland + Social Networks |
[...] late on this, but I just this minute caught up on Al over at Avoiding Life. (Background here and here.) Apparently she went in for her magically appearing referral and instead of actually getting a [...]
27.12.2007, 11:22 am