Hospitals spend E1m to import vital baby nutrition
Braun Ireland stopped producing Total Perenteral Nutrition (TPN) more than a year ago due to manufacturing difficulties. The company had supplied Irish hospitals with the feed.
Since then doctors working in maternity hospitals around the country have had to fax individual prescriptions of TPN to Britain every day to acquire the nutrition essential for critically ill babies, many of them underweight, or with bowel problems, or recovering from serious heart surgery.
Dr John Murphy, a consultant neonatologist at the National Maternity Hospital in Holles St, Dublin, said they have been asking the Department of Health for the past year to build a sterile unit capable of manufacturing TPN in Ireland.
“The way it is at the moment, it’s difficult for all of us. All of our babies are different sizes and the constituency of their feed differs. It’s not just a case of one size fits all, of taking a bag off a shelf in the pharmacy. Each baby requires an individual prescription.
“We have to rush to write out the prescriptions before we begin our ward rounds in the morning and we then have to wait for the IV nutrition to arrive by aeroplane from the UK later in the evening.”
Dr Murphy said problems arise if there are delays in arrival due to air traffic restrictions or if there is a bank holiday in Britain. “We are dealing with critically ill babies whose bodyweight does not give them much time if they are without TPN. They waste away so quickly. If they have very little fat, they urgently need nutrition.”
Dr Murphy said there were five babies at any one time at Holles St in need of TPN, with similar numbers in the Rotunda and the Coombe. He told the Irish Medical Times the numbers were replicated in other hospitals around the country, including Temple St, Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, and maternity units in Waterford, Cork and Galway.
A spokesperson for the Health Service Executive said a national TPN Expert Review Group had just issued a recommendation to the National Hospitals Office in relation to the future supply of TPN. As a result, she said the NHO was to go to tender to seek the production of TPN in Ireland.
