Hospitals spend E1m to import vital baby nutrition

Catherine Shanahan

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.