Lack of facilities and staff to give proper care due to cutbacks

CUTBACKS left hospitals without the staff and facilities vital to give proper care to people with haemophilia and their families, the Lindsay Report found.

In the early years of the contaminated blood crisis, the number of specialist and support doctors available to treat haemophiliacs infected with HIV and hepatitis C was “far less” than in hospitals of comparative size in Britain.

The physical environment in the two main treatment centres, the National Haemophilia Treatment Centre in St James’ Hospital and the National Children’s Hospital (now called the National Centre of Inherited Coagulation Disorders), was “far from ideal”.

“The implementation of plans for very necessary improvements was delayed by the financial stringency in the second half of the 1980s and, in the case of the National Children’s Hospital, by plans to move to the new hospital at Tallaght,” the report says. Support services were also inadequate. Up to 1995 the National Children’s Hospital had only one dedicated social worker working with children with haemophilia, and in St James’ “social work and counselling services were inadequate to meet the demands which were placed upon them”. Professor Ian Temperley covered the Children’s Hospital, but the hospital had no resident consultant and any junior doctors working with the patients were doing their training as paediatricians, not haematologists.

There was a “considerable delay” in providing specialist dental services to patients which arose “primarily from the general shortage of funds for health services in the late 1980s”. But Judge Lindsay found staff, including Prof Temperley, nurses and social workers, made repeated representations for improved funding to increase staff without success. She said while patients and their families displayed feelings of anger, hurt, resentment and abandonment during their testimony, these feelings were not directed towards the nursing staff at either hospital. “It is clear to the tribunal that the nurses provided dedicated and steadfast care to their patients in harrowing circumstances. Their response to what must for them, as well as everyone else, have been the frightening risk of AIDS was calm and courageous.

“They did all they could to alleviate the terrible suffering of their patients and their families,” she concluded.

She said she did not agree with some patients who criticised Prof Temperley as “arrogant, cold or dismissive” and said he provided “a very high standard of treatment, notwithstanding many difficulties of resources”.