14-hour wait with broken ribs to see doctor in A&E

A 60-year-old woman who sustained broken ribs in a car crash waited 14 hours in an emergency& department in Wexford without being seen by a doctor before heading 60km to another hospital in Waterford for treatment.

Susan Mannion, originally from London but living in Wexford Town, said: “If James Reilly and Leo Varadkar apologised to me personally, I’d tell them both to go to hell.”

After Ms Mannion was involved in a two-car crash, in which she said her car was written off, the attending ambulance took the other driver, who was more seriously injured, to hospital first and told Susan to wait for another ambulance.

“When I eventually got to the hospital in Wexford, it was just after 6pm, and the ambulance driver brought me straight into casualty, but shortly afterwards, I was placed in a wheelchair and pushed back out into the waiting room, and left on my own,” said Ms Mannion. “Nobody asked me if I had family they could contact, nobody cared, they just wanted me out of their way.”

The ambulance driver tried to help her but had to go back on duty.

Despite numerous attempts to highlight her plight, including asking for pain relief for her yet undiagnosed broken ribs, she said she was virtually ignored until a doctor arrived at 7.45am — almost 14 hours after she arrived. He told her she would have an X-ray at 9am.

“At that point I flipped, I lost it,” said Ms Mannion. “I just said to him: ‘Are you joking me? You finally bother to come and see me and then tell me I have to wait another hour.’

“I called my friend Peter [Lawlor] and he came up, got me discharged, and took me to Waterford where I was treated and released inside three hours.

“The staff there were gobsmackd when I told them I had been 14 hours in Wexford and nobody came to see me, although one doctor did say to me: ‘I live in Wexford, I’m not surprised to hear that.’

“I was treated appallingly, basically shunted to one side and ignored. I understand that if people came in in worse condition than me they deserved to be prioritised, but many of them were clearly in better shape than I was.”

Mr Lawlor, who made a formal complaint to the Wexford Hospital general manager Lily Byrnes on behalf of Ms Mannion, said: ‘At one stage, during the early hours of Wednesday, she was crying with the pain. I knocked on the door of the nurses station to alert them, but had it slammed in my face.”

The HSE said that, on the day in question, Wexford General Hospital emergency department treated almost 130 people.

The hospital also noted that two serious emergencies occurred in the Wexford area that necessitated the transfer of patients to the emergency department on that date.

“WGH regrets that, during such particularly busy periods, people may experience a delay but can reassure people that the team of dedicated and professional staff strive to minimise any impact on patients at all times,” said a spokesperson.