Lives could be lost due to hospital cutbacks, top surgeon warns

A LEADING heart and lung specialist has warned that lives could be lost because of hospital cutbacks.

“Nobody has died yet but the potential is there. The big concern we have is that people with life-threatening heart disease and lung cancer won’t be treated in time,” said Freddie Wood, a cardio-thoracic surgeon at Dublin’s Mater Hospital, said yesterday.

Mr Wood said the effect of the cutbacks would only become apparent week by week, but consultants were already extremely worried about how they would impact on services. Mr Wood, who also heads the heart and lung transplant project at the hospital, said there was no way that they would be in a position to carry out the first-ever lung transplant procedure in the autumn.

While the project was unaffected by the cutbacks, the transplant headquarters had yet to be built. The hospital had yet to apply for planning permission for the new building and Mr Wood reckoned that building work would take at least 12 months.

He said the unit would have to be operational for at least three months before the first lung transplant procedure could go ahead. “It is not the lung transplant project that concerns me at present, it’s the routine cardiac and lung cancer patients,” he said.

He explained the lung transplant programme was inevitably going ahead because the money needed to establish the unit was ring-fenced. In the long-term, however, he was concerned that the necessary staff needed to operate the unit would be available.

He said the transplant programme was dependant on consultants and nurses being able to undertake routine heart and lung surgery at a reasonable level.

The Mater’s deputy chief executive Brian Conlon said it was very difficult to see how the cutbacks would impact on hospital services. No single speciality had been earmarked for either protection or serious attention. However, the hospital’s cardiac waiting list had dropped from 1,500 two years ago to around 150.