Why do victims of medical mistakes have to fight for SO long to get the truth they deserve?

RÓISÍN and Mark Molloy have four sons. There they are at home, in the family footage shot for the 2016 People of the Year Awards, the four of them all around the dining table, slightly out of focus but still visibly doing what four young brothers do when they are together – messing around with each other.

But although there are only four living, breathing, happy boys in that footage, there are actually five boys in the room. Baby Mark is there, too. You can see him in a photograph, his perfect, tiny little face, with his eyes closed and his head crowned with a cap of downy, brown hair. Only the white tape above his lips and the small tube attached to it, just to the side of his mouth, tell you that all is not right here.

As it certainly wasn’t when little Mark was born by caesarean section at 9.31am on January 24, 2012, in the Midland Regional Hospital in Portlaoise. That’s when, upon realising that all was not as it should be, the medical staff whisked the new baby away from his mother, Róisín.

Ramifications

He was stillborn, they told her, when all efforts to save him failed. But he wasn’t. Baby Mark Molloy lived and breathed on this earth for just 22 minutes. But over the six years that have passed since that awful day for the Molloy family, their lost child has more than made his mark.

He may only have lived for less than half an hour, but the impact of his short life – and death – has had profound and important ramifications.

You’d have to have been living in a bunker for the past few years not to be aware of Róisín and Mark Molloy.

Talk about warrior parents. From the day they lost their son they have been searching for answers – not just in relation to their own tragic loss, but for other grieving parents who also lost babies in Portlaoise hospital.

On Tuesday, following the verdict of the Medical Council inquiry into their son’s death, which found the doctor in charge during Róisín’s labour not guilty of professional misconduct or poor professional performance on five out of seven allegations of wrongdoing, the Molloys were visibly shocked and saddened by the outcome. The two remaining claims related to note taking. And yet, despite that, they are determined to carry on.

‘There’s more work to be done,’ Róisín said, her husband stating that the inquiry had given them no closure whatsoever but that it had, in fact, raised more quesHealth tions. What the Molloys have always stressed, throughout the long six years since their son’s death, is that the loss of little Mark was not just the result of particular action or lack of action during his mother’s labour. Rather, they have always argued, what happened to their son was partly because reports into previous baby deaths and injuries at Portlaoise were never acted upon.

Recommendations were ignored. It was, effectively, business as usual.

There’s no such thing as business as usual for the Molloys. Not only did they take a case – which was subsequently settled – against the HSE, suing for emotional suffering and stress as a result of their child’s death, but they battled for the report into his death to be published.

Two years after that report was completed, the Molloys finally got what they fought for, the report identifying a number of crucial failings in the care that was received by Róisín and her son.

‘These reports should not be kept hidden away,’ Róisín said. ‘They provide an opportunity for shared learning, not just in the hospital where the baby died, but in all maternity units across the country. The policy of containment, where reports are not released, is no longer tolerable.’

Investigation

Nor was their own report the only one the Molloys were responsible for.

Frustrated during their dealings with the HSE after their bereavement, and in the knowledge that four other babies had died at Portlaoise over a few, short years, they got together with other parents who were also looking for answers about practices in the hospital and they campaigned for an independent investigation. The result of that persistence was a damning Information and Quality Authority report, which concluded that services at Portlaoise were unsafe. Tuesday, as Róisín poignantly pointed out after the inquiry verdict that day, was 75 months to the day since her baby’s death. Seventy-five months. Think about that for a moment and run through your head all the things that have happened in your life, and on the international stage, since baby Mark died.

For over six years the Molloys have been doing battle. It’s easy to forget the extent of what they have been going through. It’s not just that they have lost a child, it’s that they have been lied to, that they have had to fight every step of the way. And now here they are, it’s almost the summer of 2018, and they are still looking for the truth, and for justice for their little boy.

That any grieving parents should be subjected to such a prolonged ordeal is inhuman. That any system allows that to happen is simply wrong.

While the doctor at the centre of the Molloys’ story was largely cleared of any wrongdoing this week, the Molloys are not letting this go.

All along they have argued that those who were in a position to give them answers kept denying them those answers. ‘Each level,’ Róisín has said in the past, ‘wasn’t doing what it should be doing. You’d imagine that the death of our son, surely, would be enough to change things but, in reality, it wasn’t.’

Procedures

All they want, all they’ve ever wanted, is the truth, and for procedures to be put in place that will ensure that no other parents suffer in the way that they had to suffer. And while all the answers in the world won’t bring their son back, it will at least help them come to terms with why he was taken from them after just 22 minutes of life.

Mark Molloy puts it perfectly: ‘If your child falls in school, you want to know what happened.’ Of course you do. And more than that – you have a right to know. How greater a right, then, when it comes to the life and death of your child.

The Molloys are warriors. Even in the wake of the devastating inquiry verdict, they have no intention of going quietly. There are already meetings scheduled with Health Minister Simon Harris.

‘We’re never going to shout for Mark on the side of the football or rugby pitch,’ Mark Molloy said last year, ‘so we’re certainly going to shout for him now.’ I bet they will. Just as a PS, I wrote this piece yesterday before the full details of the Vicky Phelan case had emerged. And you wonder... have we learned anything?