Hospital overhaul to be extended nationwide

AN OVERHAUL of the way acute hospital care is delivered in the north east to improve patient safety is to be replicated nationally.

Health Service Executive chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm said we had to accept that it was not just in the north east that patients were exposed to increased risks.

“We are far from an ideal service,” Prof Drumm declared at the launch yesterday of a new report that claims the provision of acute services by five local hospitals in the region was exposing patients to increased risks and creating additional professional risks for staff.

“I think we have to accept that across this country, not only in the north east, we are challenged with this problem,” he said.

The report, commissioned by the HSE, says the opportunity exists over the next 10 years to develop a very high-quality, responsive emergency and planned care service within existing hospitals and other local centres supported by a new regional hospital.

Prof Drumm said people had to accept that everything could not be done at their doorstep. People were being exposed to unnecessary risk by having complicated surgery carried out in situations where it should not be carried out.

The report was conducted following the public outcry over the death of Patrick Joseph Walsh, who bled to death in Monaghan Hospital.

The 75-year-old had a bleeding ulcer that required emergency surgery but he could not be operated on in Monaghan as surgeons there were not permitted to do emergency surgery.

The report also comes after the report of Judge Maureen Harding Clarke on Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital.

The HSE, which has no specific Government funding to implement the report, is to set up a North East Steering Group and a project director to review and implement the report’s recommendations.

The group will, however, act immediately to improve patient safety in the immediate term as well as considering the most suitable location for a new regional hospital.

The report also recommends the development of the emergency ambulance service in 2015 where advanced paramedics could decide whether or not a patient needs to be taken to an acute hospital.

But Monaghan Community Alliance chair Peadar McMahon said putting paramedics on ambulances would not improve the situation in Monaghan.

“When Monaghan Hospital went off call between 2002 and 2005 we had numerous deaths due both to traffic accidents and heart attacks. These are deaths that may not have happened had they been taken to hospital sooner,” he said.

Mr McMahon has also written to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and the Tánaiste and Minister for Health complaining about the way his late elderly mother was treated at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. The hospital is likely to be chosen as the location for the new regional hospital.

“We are now expected to go to that same hospital with all our major illnesses to be treated like that,” he stressed.