Inez McCormack is a well known women’s and human rights activist and trade unionist – she is a former President of the ICTU. Inez founded and currently advises the highly commended PPR (Participation and Practice of Rights) in Northern Ireland, which enables marginalised communities and groups to effectively participate in the economic and social decision making in order to change and improve the quality of their lives. It has achieved international commendation and Mary Robinson has described its work as ‘groundbreaking’.

My health… and yours will be detrimentally affected by the continued stubborn refusal of healthcare decision makers to engage with us as they make tough decisions about what Ireland’s healthcare should look like. I’ve watched the work of a group of mental health service users and family members bereaved through suicide known as the Belfast Mental Health Rights Group (BMHRG) since 2006. They have been working to try and ensure how their own experience of tragedy can be used to avert it for others through making service provision pro-active and responsive.  By monitoring issues they have identified as barriers to accessible treatment and setting human rights indicators and benchmarks they are working to improve access to and delivery of mental health services. Despite this work resulting in significant changes and their struggle being commended by international experts, decision makers still refuse to treat them with the basic respect and dignity they deserve.

My Health fear is… the effect of the refusal by some  health service delivery bodies to listen to and value the experience of those using mental health services. This enables them to identify barriers to the system working effectively. For over four years, the BMHRG campaigned for a simple, low cost change in the appointment system for those presenting at A&E in distress, so that the most vulnerable amongst us would have that lifeline of knowing that we are tied into services and not on our own. For four years they were pushed from pillar to post. I fear that the delays and distortion and dilution of what this group campaigned to achieve will extend the experience of tragedy to other families.

My Healthcare fear is … that the healthcare system will refuse to adapt. That healthcare policy which, at its core, is premised upon the desire to improve our health for the better will remain so entangled in the bureaucracy of its own making that it will stifle the good ideas, smart ideas brought by people who have the lived experience of the system and who require respectful dialogue on that basis. If we allow a system of healthcare to continue which denies this engagement, which denies rights, which denies dignity, we will have created a system of healthcare which does the opposite of what it should.

Ireland’s healthcare is… in danger if it continues to prevent the experts on the ground, the people who use it, to work to make it better. I’ve been convinced of this for a long time, but it was reaffirmed recently when I listened to a member of the BMHRG, Bette, a mental health service user herself, explain it in a meeting with Thomas Hammarberg, European Commissioner for Human Rights during his recent trip to Belfast.

She said:

“We’re the people on the ground, we’re the people with the voice, especially with mental health. We’re being told how we should feel without giving us the chance to say how we feel and what we need. But we will march on and we will fight because you know we are all human and we need the respect and the dignity that we all deserve and that's not happening now, we need change in the system.”

My healthcare dream for Ireland is… that the work of Bette and other courageous members of the group are accorded dignity not humiliation. That by doing so the resources in mental care are demonstrably and effectively used to reduce the appalling statistics that show suicide in Northern Ireland has risen by 47 per cent in the last five years.  That healthcare in Ireland will be about serving the needs and rights of the people of Ireland, especially the most vulnerable. This will only change when dignity, right and respect are the daily coin of relationship and resource.

I, Inez McCormack, have signed the Healthcare Guaranteed petition and have asked the government to provide a legal guarantee of equal access to healthcare in Ireland. You should too.

You can sign the Healthcare Guaranteed petition online, now.