Deaths of garda and her baby a reminder of hospital’s troubles

THE night Tania McCabe and one of her newborn twins died was one that staff at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda must wish they could forget.

As they battled to save the young mother and her baby sons, they were also fighting a gut-wrenching feeling of failure, knowing they had sent her home two days earlier after missing the signs of her impending medical crisis.

For the doctors, midwives and nurses who pushed their medical skills and manpower to the limit that night, Tania was a reminder of what was wrong at the hospital and how little power they had to make things right.

She was not the only one. The Health Service Executive (HSE) knew since January 2006 Our Lady’s was in trouble after Judge Maureen Harding Clark told them so.

In her report into the Dr Michael Neary scandal, where an obstetrician spent years subjecting post-natal mothers to unnecessary hysterectomies, the judge observed that the hospital had a history of “very heavy workloads” and under-staffing.

Recruitment was stalled by “unwieldy bureaucracy”, she said. “Over and over, we were told of political interests and political motives for taking or not taking certain steps.”

While her brief was to look back at the hospital’s past, her message was meant for those in charge into the future. “The Department of Health and Children and the HSE have the power to ensure that professional medical institutions have the legal authority and the financial resources to properly and effectively regulate their members,” she stated.

A further reminder of Our Lady’s struggles came in October 2006 in a report by Patrick Kinder, chairman of the maternity services task force for the north-east. He said there was an “urgent need to review staffing and accommodation requirements” in the hospital’s maternity unit.

There were 4,273 live births at the hospital the year Tania and her baby died compared to 1,889 ten years earlier with no equivalent increase in staff.

Alarm bells were also being rung by other observers. In January 2007, the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland expressed concerns about risks to patients due to the workload and lack of resources in the hospital’s general medical unit.

In March that year, the hospital’s own medical board said staff shortages left patients “exposed to a high level of risk across all departments”.

It should come as no surprise that the report into the deaths of Tania McCabe and her baby son once again highlighted the under-resourcing of the maternity and paediatric units.

Staff were working “in very difficult conditions” and the care they tried to provide was “compromised by their workload and the environment in which they were working”.

Staff at Our Lady’s would like to be able to forget nights like March 9, 2007 and to put out of their minds failures which blight their attempts to care for their patients.

But unlike those in power who sit at a remove from the cries of grief that echo along crisis-ridden corridors, they don’t have the luxury of selective amnesia.