Monaghan transfer policy ‘unworkable’

HOSPITAL consultants say a Health Service Executive (HSE) directive that all patients at Monaghan General Hospital needing emergency surgery must be transferred immediately to Cavan General Hospital is unworkable.

Since the death of retired farmer Patrick Joe Walsh, 76, almost a year ago, the HSE has instructed that all requests for transfer from Monaghan to Cavan must be granted and processed immediately without question.

An independent report into Mr Walsh’s death in Monaghan almost a year ago found that his death was avoidable and recommended that acute in-patient services at the hospital be suspended immediately.

The elderly man needed emergency surgery for a burst duodenal ulcer but attempts to transfer him to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda and Cavan General both failed — Drogheda refused to take him and Cavan said it had no beds available. It later transpired that beds were available in both hospitals.

Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) deputy general secretary, Donal Duffy, said he believed the purpose of the directive was to look after the interests of the administrators and the politicians to take the focus off them if anything went wrong in the future.

“It is not in the best interests of patient care,” he insisted.

Mr Duffy said consultants could not give a guarantee that patients transferred from Monaghan would be admitted to the Cavan hospital.

“We can’t give that sort of guarantee but we will certainly ensure that any patient that needs to be transferred is either taken into Cavan in the first instance or will assist, if they can, in the transfer to another appropriate facility,” he said.

Mr Duffy described an incident three weeks ago where a patient in Monaghan hospital developed an aneurysm, or burst blood vessel, after 5pm and needed emergency surgery.

The consultant surgeon who undertook vascular work happened to be in the hospital at the time but was unable to operate on the patient in Monaghan.

After checking with Cavan the consultant found that the procedure could not be conducted in the hospital and eventually arranged for the patient to be transferred to St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, where he was operated on.

Mr Duffy pointed out that it took the consultant around two hours to arrange for the patient to be transferred from Monaghan to Dublin.

HSE hospital network manager, Chris Lyons, said very few patients needing emergency surgery were presenting at Monaghan but those that did were being transferred immediately and without question to Cavan.