Hospital chief asks Santa to solve funding crisis

THE head of the country’s oldest maternity hospital has repeated a 266-year-old plea for Santa to solve his facility’s funding and staffing crisis because health service management can’t do so.

Writing in today’s Irish Examiner, Dr Sam Coulter-Smith, master of Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital, said that, like the facility’s first master Bartholomew Mosse in 1745, he does not believe senior health service officials are capable of properly caring for mothers and newborns.

“My big fear is that we’re going to lose our stressed and overworked doctors and midwives if maternity services don’t receive proper attention very soon. So Santa, can you please persuade the people who fund our health service to understand the need to address these issues,” Dr Coulter-Smith wrote.