The news from the Irish Cancer Society today that over 3,000 people are waiting over three months to have a colonoscopy is another shock statistic from our chaotic health service. It’s another broken promise from the HSE who promised last year that 100% of patients would have colonoscopies with 13 weeks. This is a life and death situation for people as early diagnosis is the key to cancer treatment. Minister Varadkar and the HSE must do everything possible to address this disastrous situation immediately and not in two or three months time. We have a new Endoscopy Unit lying idle in Roscommon Hospital, could that building be used to shorten these waiting lists? The hospitals north of the border should be enlisted to help in this regard too. It is just not good enough to keep trotting out statistics of growing waiting lists while people are waiting for months for these potentially life saving scans. Once again the darling of the national media Leo Varadkar escaped any serious critisism as the health service limps from one crisis to another. This is a matter of life and death and it is time for the Minister to ‘man up’ and take responsibility for this department or he should resign and let some one else do it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The news from the Irish Cancer Society today that over 3,000 people are waiting over three months to have a colonoscopy is another shock statistic from our chaotic health service….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1267","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1269,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions\/1269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}