Health served by ‘dysfunctional ministers’

A FORMER master of Dublin’s Holles Street Maternity Hospital has said he has “given up” on politicians’ initiative and imagination.

Speaking yesterday on RTÉ Radio, Dr Peter Boylan, an obstetrician at Holles Street, said Ireland has had a “series of dysfunctional ministers”.

“Brian Cowen was utterly hopeless as minister for health. Micheál Martin was known as the ‘minister for reports’. Mary Harney, basically, has not been a success,” he said.

Dr Boylan said that midwives at Holles Street do not have enough time to spend with the women.

“Sometimes there will be two women in the same bed on the same day. In a six-bed ward you might have seven or even eight beds and that really is not good for women’s dignity, it’s not good for midwifery’s dignity and it’s also not good for medical practice,” he said.

Last year, Tania McCabe died hours after delivering twins in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda.

An inquiry into her death found that maternity services there were significantly under-resourced.

Dr Boylan said that the inquiry reflected what is going on in maternity units around the country.

“The reports have consistently drawn attention to poor infrastructure, poor investment and poor support by effectively dysfunctional management, primarily at a more senior level — that would mean the Department of Health or the health boards preceding the HSE,” he said.

“Maternity hospitals are faced with a very dysfunctional management, who don’t really appear to appreciate the realities of life on the ground.

“One of the reasons for that may well be that the managers never experienced the day-to-day reality that public patients would experience...”

Dr Boylan said that it is “extraordinarily frustrating and dispiriting to work in a system where everybody, the dogs on the street, seem to know what the problems are but the people who can fix it will refuse to just see the light and do something about it”.

He also said that figures for maternal mortality are “very good but not as good as we claim them to be”.

“Figures are under-reported,” he said. “The reason for that is that the death certificate in Ireland does not have anywhere on it to say whether the woman was pregnant within the previous year.”

He added: “Nobody should be particularly alarmed by this. It might be in excess of maybe three or four deaths. In purely statistical terms it doesn’t make a huge difference but we’ve got to be a little bit careful because there is significant under-reporting of maternal deaths.”