The Irish Health Service (IHS) will become a “new world” for health policy, according to the president of the Irish Association of Medical Colleges (AIMCO).
Dr Michael Murphy, president of AIMCO, made the remarks on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland programme today.
He said that “the IHS has become a new world for health.”
“We have the opportunity to create a new health service for Ireland.
A new health system.
It’s the opportunity that we have to go there and to be the next health system in the world,” he said.”
The IHS is going to become a global health service, it’s going to be a global system.”
Murphy, who is also the president and CEO of Aims Ireland, a national health and social care association, said that the IHS would be a “very special system” and that it would be “unusual for the whole of the country”.
He said it would “be an opportunity to take a huge leap forward for the country.”
“It will be unusual for the entire country to go and do something like this, a new global health system, because we have an existing system,” he added.
“But the opportunity for Ireland is so great, we have a huge population that’s really in need of services.”
Murphys comments come after the Irish Government said the Irish public was in favour of the IHI going into the new world.
It said that in the latest poll conducted in the wake of the death of Joanne McAlinden, the health service was viewed as “the safest service in the country” by a clear majority of respondents.
The results also found that 68 per cent of people thought that the service was doing a good job of providing primary health care, compared with 36 per cent who thought that it was doing poorly.