We’re numb to the pain of how poor our health service is
ONCE you get through the hospital doors, you’re supposed to feel safe. There can’t be many parents who haven’t had that moment: in the adrenaline-charged chaos and panic that follows an accident or an unexplained illness, racing to the hospital with your child and not daring to think more than a few seconds ahead. And then you’re through the doors, you’re in the department, there are people there who know what to do. Maybe it’s the first time you exhale since you ran. Because now, everything will surely be alright. You’re safe. Your child is safe.
Three weeks ago, a 16-year-old girl died in front of her mother in the Accident and Emergency department of University Hospital Limerick, hours after she passed through its doors. The girl, an only child, had been rushed to the hospital suffering from breathing difficulties. She was initially admitted to the resuscitation area but was deemed well enough to be moved to a trolley in a corridor.
However, her condition deteriorated and following repeated pleas from her mother, a doctor ordered she be moved back to the packed resuscitation area. A witness described the mother’s ‘increasingly anguished cries for help,’ as her only child was placed on a trolley in the middle of the resuscitation room, since there was no room in any individual berth. You don’t need a witness to confirm what sounds like absolute chaos.
As medics rushed to revive the teenager, a patient was transferred out of a resuscitation berth and she was moved into their place. However, prolonged efforts to revive the girl failed.
The tragedy comes as the hospital is already under review following the death of another 16-year-old girl, Aoife Johnston from Shannon, at the same A&E department in December 2022. Aoife died of sepsis after enduring a 12-hour wait on a trolley in the overcrowded A&E.
An investigation into this latest teenage death in the hospital will come to its own conclusions, but you don’t need to wait for official Ireland to confirm that our health service is utterly, systemically broken. Everybody in this country now tries to avoid getting sick simply because entering into the service at any level involves waiting lists at best, and a complete failure of care at worst. Many of us routinely choose private outpatient EDs over public hospitals or we pay for out-ofhours GP services that consult and prescribe over the phone to patients they’ve never met. I’ve done it myself, I’ve done it for my children. We have become used to trying to avoid the public health service at any cost.
I used to make pithy comments on this page about the absurd delays in building the new children’s hospital. When it was at its initial planning stages, I wrote here about the difficulty I would have getting my children to its proposed site – but I also pointed out that in the case of my eldest daughter, who was eight, that might have been a moot point as she would probably be too old for paediatric services by the time the new hospital opened its doors.
SHE’S about to turn 28 now. And while that is convenient for sarky comment, the stark reality is that there’s nothing remotely funny about it. We throw our eyes to heaven at the endlessly spiralling costs of the new hospital and sometimes we forget all the children who have been abjectly failed by decades of this State-funded foot dragging and delay.
I have lost track of all the election years that have passed since the National Children’s Hospital fiasco started. But I know that time and time again, we push health further and further down the list of voter concerns and issues when the politicians come calling seeking our vote. Maybe we’re the ones becoming institutionalised by a failed service, maybe we no longer expect – or even believe we deserve – a decent medical service. We get distracted by shiny things like Toy Show the Musical and we forget successive governments’ consistent failure to provide a health service that is anywhere near fit for purpose.
But this is not about boring stuff like budgets. This is about two 16-year-old girls who died horrible deaths in chaotic, deplorable surroundings in the place where they should have been safe. We can no longer exhale when we carry our children through the doors of our hospitals. When the elections crank up in the coming months, surely that is more important than anything else.