Hospitals Tour

Today we visited three children's hospitals:
Tallaght - on the southwest corner of Dublin, in view of the Wicklow mountains,
Our Lady's at Crumlin,
and the University Children's Hospital at Temple Street.
We learned a lot about the Irish health care system and found plenty of similarities. One striking difference is that social workers DON'T deal with the nuts and bolts of discharge planning; their role is much more of providing support, and deaingl with child protection and socio-economic issues, than of ordering supplies and homecare. Sounds kind of "grand" now, doesn't it?

(For the record, the brogues are mild here, but there's a certain inflection that's hard not to pick up)

There are plans afoot for a centralized National Children's Hospital to be built in 2014 that will consolidate the three we saw today, but there seems to be much political wrangling ahead before that actually happened. We hope our Irish colleagues will come a visit us in NYC. (Particularly Jenny, who sent us on to a lovely dinner at the Ely HQ Gastro Pub

Not many pictures, but here's one of the mountains by Tallaght (from one of our lengthy bus rides) and the registration desk at Crumlin, basically telling people they have to wait their turn.

























Our Rock Star of the Day: The Edge, who's a benefactor of Crumlin. Didn't see him, but cool to feel the presence.

Conference Day

The Changing Health conference opened with a speech by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese. Our sense is that while the role of president is mostly that of figurehead, she seems both knowledgeable and engaging, and seems thoroughly well liked (note to self, learn more about Irish system of government).



























We spent the morning at Reilly Hall on the UCD campus, and then headed over to the Health Sciences building for parallel sessions, where both Rhonda and Allison were presenting. Allison and I stopped for a picture in front of Noah's Egg, in honor of our reproductive technology research.














The sessions I attending were interesting - one set about involving presenters from children's hospitals in the US, Zurich, and Singapore. The presenter from Zurich presented about poverty in child health - somewhat funny in that only 4% of their population are every considered to be "working poor", and that statistically, working poverty is generally inducing by HAVING children. The next session included an overly academic presentation by one of my NYU faculty members followed by some good presentations about "clinical data mining" (basically, using hospital records as sources of data) and encouraging better partnerships between academics and practitioners. The Dublin hospital that did this succeeded by...hiring a PhD to coordinate research! Ahem, Montefiore...

Some problematic things about the conference - sessions were scheduled so that all pediatric topics were on one day, and all geriatric on the other. Many (if not most) attendees were also presented or at least had a poster - so then lost time to see others' work. And one had to choose which of several good sessions to attend and which to pass up.

On the positive, it's a rare occasion that the people actually doing the work, setting the policy, and doing the research, are all in one room. It was also nice to read the IFSW's Statement on Health - primarily a statement that health is a matter of basic human rights.

So after all the talking, thinking, question-asking, and trying-hard-not-to-fall-asleep-from-jetlag, we tossed our pashminas around our shoulders, and headed off to an evening at Dublin Castle...

Our Rock Star of the Day: President Mary McAleese