The best guarantee that Mallow stays open is that they can’t do without us

Dr Michael Pead on why the future of Mallow General Hospital is assured

I THINK when staff at Mallow General Hospital first heard that the HIQA investigation was going to occur, everyone was very upset and very paranoid.

I think the reason for this was because the only previous example of this type of investigation was in relation to Ennis General Hospital, and Ennis was very quickly almost closed as far as I understand it, on foot of HIQA’s findings, and it was felt that was a possibility here.

To be fair, when the HIQA investigators arrived last September, everyone was dreading the interviews, everyone was terrified, but actually everyone came out feeling they’d been listened to. And what’s good is that at last, the report comes out and does vindicate the extreme professionalism adhered to in Mallow under quite difficult circumstances.

This is a very different report, this is not another Ennis.

If you read through the report they are saying we don’t have enough space, we don’t have enough this, that and the other.

If you need an example of a lean hospital, you cannot get more lean than Mallow. We’ve lived on nothing for a very long time and we’ve made do for a very long time. What that means is that the staff are the hospital and it’s the quality of the staff, the quality of the leaders of that staff that made sure HIQA could find that no patient there had come to harm.

We only do things that we feel we can do. The people there are professional, they know what they can and can’t do, and if we get a patient that for whatever reason exceeds what we can do for them, our duty is to put that patient in a place where they can be looked after and we’ve done that over and over again. We now have a system to make sure that that doesn’t happen perhaps as often as it used to.

Things take time to change and if you shut one service without providing that same service elsewhere, then patients suffer, and that’s not the business we are in. That may appear as tardiness, or even glacial slowness in some cases, but unless you get it right, then somebody will suffer.

There’s an awful lot of talk about downgrading and I know Mallow has been on a solo run for quite a while, and when I came to the hospital the first time (2006, before leaving for Britain and then returning in 2009), it was a very sort of standalone place. When I came back, it had changed. I don’t think that the staff of Mallow see what they are going to be doing in the future as downgrading at all.

When Joe Sherlock (former Labour TD, now deceased father of Seán Sherlock) was in Mallow, your chances of surviving from a car accident was entirely dependent on how quickly you got to a hospital.

That’s no longer the case. Now if you have a car accident and you’re seriously, critically ill, it’s more important that you get to a place that has all the appropriate facilities.

So I can understand that the people in Mallow would like a hospital in Mallow that can deal with everything, but it is no longer appropriate that they should pop into Mallow for their major accident.

Much more importantly, they don’t wait for the things that we provide for them, that we provide very well, day in and day out, and I can tell you for sure, despite HIQA’s saying that we do quite minimal amounts of complex surgery — we do complicated cases. There is nothing that we are doing in Mallow that we don’t feel absolutely that we should be doing and that HIQA absolutely have said that we can do competently.

In Mallow, for the past 20 years, is a small number of highly professional consultants, who have governed themselves if you like, to a very high standard and that’s why we are where we are.

Going forward you cannot rely on that for your hospital. You have to have systems in place that make sure that no rogue surgeon can do damage to the public and we are now in the process of producing that to the same standard, if not higher, than anywhere else in the country.

I’m not sure I trust Ger Reaney [HSE Area manager for Cork, who said the future of Mallow was assured] but the best guarantee we’ve got that Mallow stays open is that I’ve seen the numbers and they can’t do without us.

They couldn’t cope if we stopped working and that’s the best guarantee we’ve got.

* Dr Michael Pead is consultant anaesthetist at Mallow General Hospital.