Couple offer home to patients in need

A RETIRED couple have offered their home to the Health Service Executive for use as an isolation unit for cystic fibrosis suffers.

Noreen and Brendan Doyle, in their 60s, live in a five-bedroom bungalow close to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin.

Ms Doyle said she offered her home to the HSE after hearing seriously ill CF sufferers plead for a hospital bed on RTÉ’s Liveline on Monday.

The two young women who needed to be admitted to hospital for treatment did not want to be admitted though accident and emergency because the cross contamination risk.

Ms Doyle believes her home could be used as an annex to Beaumont, one of the country’s CF treatment centres, until the hospital got a new 35-bed isolation unit.

Three of the five bedrooms in the bungalow are en-suite and there are two large living rooms.

The couple, who had previously run a bed and breakfast business, decided to offer their home because they did not believe the health authority could come up with a better solution any quicker.

Ms Doyle said they would probably move into rented accommodation if the HSE decided to take it over.

That was not a problem, she stressed.

“We could leave immediately and give them the use of our home until they came up with another solution,” she said.

Ms Doyle said she was very annoyed by the lax response by the HSE to the needs of CF sufferers.

“It is not a new sickness. Action should have been taken years ago,” she said.

Consultant respiratory physician at Beaumont Hospital Prof Gerry McElvaney said that while improvements were being made at CF treatment centres, they were not happening fast enough.

“In any situation where people die so young, you should never be happy with the status quo,” he said.

While investment in CF personnel had markedly improved over the last two years there were not enough treatment facilities to minimise the risk of cross-infection.

No person with CF should have to be admitted through an A&E department, said Prof McElvaney.

He said he believed the situation at Beaumont would improve dramatically if the hospital had a designated CF unit.