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Tony O'Brien

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Tony O’Brien: We are not hearing the inconvenient truth about HSE funding increases

Government spin about ‘record’ spending on the health service doesn’t paint the full picture. Recent service plans didn’t solve the most pressing long-term problems and neither will the 2023 version

Tony O’Brien: True cost of delayed cancer diagnosis during Covid only now becoming clear

The Covid pandemic may be over, but cancer patients and their families will be counting the cost of Ireland’s long lockdowns for years to come

Tony O’Brien: GPs are the lynchpin of a workable health system

Community-based care is the only way forward for a healthy population in the future, so we urgently need to solve the crisis in general practice

Tony O’Brien: Playing the Covid blame game won’t help us to deal with the next health crisis

Let’s not waste time pretending there was a ‘perfect’ way our leaders could have handled the pandemic – we need real learning, not recriminations

International Protection

Tony O’Brien: Organised racism poses a clear and present danger

The government must address the valid concerns of ordinary citizens around issues such as housing policy and access to healthcare and prevent far-right agitators from exploiting these grievances to promote their own racist agenda

Tony O’Brien: We must not sleepwalk into a GP crisis in Irish healthcare

Access to GP care remains relatively good in this country, but with factors like natural ageing, burnout and the corporatisation of GP care, we should be worried that this access could disappear

Tony O’Brien: Donnelly must avoid backlash to proposed consultants’ contract

In bypassing the relevant bodies before they have completed their member consultation processes, the Minister for Health is taking a huge gamble

Tony O’Brien: Empty sanitiser dispensers a fitting symbol of politicians’ short memory

Our politicians behave as if there is nothing between a complete lockdown and pretending that Covid has gone away, but they are totally wrong

Tony O’Brien: He got his wish to keep his job in health, but now Donnelly must produce results

Lengthening waiting lists, record high trolley counts and too few healthcare staff are just some of the problems that the minister needs to deal with urgently

Tony O’Brien: Our medicines system would be better off without the HSE, and the HSE without it

Under-resourced and overly complicated bureaucratic, the drugs approval and reimbursement process is both a hidden waiting list and the likely subject of a future commission of inquiry

Our ‘hidden waiting list’ of delays in access to medicines is costing lives

An independent review of our entire drugs reimbursement system is urgently needed as patients wait far longer here for new drugs than in most of Europe

Listen: Stephen Donnelly on the pandemic, politics and the quest for universal healthcare

In an exclusive interview, Tony O’Brien talks to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly about his baptism of fire, his relationship with former HSE boss Paul Reid, Sláintecare, and ‘finishing the job’

Tony O’Brien: Lack of accountability will doom Sláintecare’s regional system to failure

Five years on from the launch of Sláintecare, there is still no plan to legislate for the establishment of regional health areas as entities distinct from the HSE

Tony O’Brien: HSE’s more honest winter plan avoids the ritual pain points of bogus targets

Unusually, this year health minister Stephen Donnelly has produced a transparent list of funded initiatives that, in the short to medium term, are capable of improving the quality of the health service

Tony O’Brien: Donnelly gets rough end of budget stick as grand health plan at a standstill

Cancer programmes and dental health largely overlooked, funding for new medicines reduced and an under-resourced GP system all point to a budget that suits an economic rather than a health strategy

Tony O’Brien: Sláintecare struggles show we need a new approach to policymaking

The much-touted healthcare policy has been reduced to a broadly meaningless catchphrase, with absolutely no hope of it being achieved in its ten-year time frame

Tony O’Brien: Cowen’s silly season HSE proposal shows where real dysfunctions lie

The Fianna Faíl TD should know that there is zero prospect of his suggestion to amalgamate the roles of HSE chief and Health secretary general being taken seriously

Tony O’Brien: Health systems will continue to decline until we change focus to quality of care

The impact of the pandemic and the legacy of the financial crash means patients and medics are paying the price for the perception that healthcare is a cost rather than a value, according to a report based on evidence gathered from multiple health systems

Main job of incoming chiefs will be to usher in new era for HSE

The pandemic emergency meant doing things differently – and the new health service hires at the top must now harness these better methods

Tony O’Brien: We should take the global lead on assistive tech in healthcare

Assistive technology enables people to live independent and dignified lives, and Ireland should grasp the opportunity to become a champion in this area