Louise Burne

Yeah, she's obviously, most people would have described it as a feisty interview.

I think the masters of the hospitals listening, particularly the Rotunda and the consultants listening, would have, I believe, thought that they were on notice.

The main takeaway for me was...

that actually this is less about a two-tier system and more about the state being the indemnifier and the insurance provider.

It reminded me of a piece that John Crown actually wrote a few years ago during COVID for the Irish Times saying, that's what we should be moving towards.

We should be moving towards a social insurance system rather than the sláinte care system because we should be kind of looking for the hospitals to compete against each other.

We should be looking for that level of productivity, the idea of consulting contracts without productivity.

actually doesn't get where we want to get.

What I would have liked to hear as a woman and as a user of the maternity health care system, how do you make the public health care system act like the private health care system?

And she got into that a little bit by saying, you know, the consultants will be there to work the hours.

But that's not the entire...

reason that the public system doesn't operate in the same way as the private system and the women who we've talked to over the last few weeks last week and said why do you use the private system they say continuity of care if we've had difficult pregnancies before and the idea that we'll have the same doctor and that is we didn't get the answers you asked and we didn't get the answers okay Louise I mean there's a lot in this but the overarching theme is that some women want the right to choose where does this go from here

it's not going to work and she's going to lose the argument and i think the the question is where does it go from here because i it no one seems to be backing down and it is a little bit chicken egg then she's saying i can't get it to operate like the public the private system until i have the hours and the consultants working in the same so i can understand that but the the the thing where it just keeps coming back to is but we have two-tier systems across the healthcare and

And she was saying we don't, but we do because they have private hospitals.

But why are we having this feisty fight about women's healthcare when we don't have about anything else that we've privatised in this country?

Like, why is this the one that we're going to, like, really have to fight on and take choice away from women?

Like, the morality of that and, like, the, you know, I think most people in the country would say, yes, our public system should be as good as our private system.

So without that argument, but we are now arguing about privatisation of something because it's women's healthcare.

When we don't, like, we're not having an argument about why the state pays for private teachers in private schools.

Like, we haven't had that argument.