Funding infertility

The Government funds homes that install solar panels and replace lead pipes, writes Maurice Gueret. Why are they so mean about installing children?

IVF Birthday

in 2018, the UK will celebrate the 40th birthday of their first IVF baby. Their NHS offers (in theory, at least) three public service IVF cycles for women under 40 who have been unable to conceive after two years. In Ireland, everybody pays their own way. For many, treatment is prohibitively expensive. Our State will prescribe spectacles, heat your house, straighten teeth, sustain your erections and remove contraceptive devices free of charge. But it doesn’t react kindly to bills for hard-to-conceive babies. Such offspring are less cherished than the romping, sturdy, athletic, easy-to-come-by babies rated six-a-penny by Ireland’s founding fathers. You can avail of state grants for hearing aids, solar panels and replacing lead pipes. But should you need sperm injected, eggs stimulated, ovulations induced, embryos frozen, or blastocysts transferred, there isn’t a crumb of direct State aid. You, your partner and your bills are on your own. Ireland’s politicians have studiously avoided having anything to do with assisting conceptions for too long. Minister Harris is supposedly reviewing what they do in other countries, and his review was due to end last December. Unlike us, when it comes to couples-withoutmeans, what other countries

don’t do is absolutely nothing. Almost nine months on from the conclusion of his review, it’s time Simon delivered.

Mouthwash-gate

What happens in hospitals used to remain pretty much within their walls. Stories might circulate among staff, or between patients, but matters only went public if aired in a judge’s or coroner’s court. That was then. Earlier this summer, a consultant held a glass of liquid to the lips of a dehydrated patient. The man was parched and gulped down the drink. The world now knows that the container was filled with a chemical mouthwash and not water. Symptoms were nasty, but short-lived. Apologies were profuse for Mouthwash-gate, described as an “unfortunate incident” by hospital management. New policies were adopted. Pledges were sworn that learning would be shared across the hospital. Mouthwash routines are now one-off events. Partly used containers will no longer be left lying around for afters. In an ideal world, all hospitals across the world would now copy our new policy. In an even more ideal world, we might have known before this incident that it’s by no means the first time this has ever happened.

Medical Acronyms

The newspaper reporting of Mouthwash-gate was most interesting. I did read somewhere that the CNM of the ICU at MUH had implemented new oral mouth-care guidelines. Perhaps we also need some new guidelines on acronyms. MUH might clearly mean Mayo University Hospital if you live in Castlebar, but to northside Dubliners, it could easily be the Mater’s University Hospital, and Corkonians could equally claim it for their own Mercy University Hospital. In fact, the Mercy’s email domain is MUH. ICU is an intensive-care unit to me, but on a teenager’s smartphone ICU might mean ‘I see you’ when a friend is spotted on the other side of the street. CNM in this case refers to a clinical nurse manager, but in other jurisdictions it refers to a certified nurse midwife; a College of Nursing and Midwifery; or a muscle condition known as centronuclear myopathy. When you award people or things longer names and titles, you increase the chance that they will end up being abbreviated. This summer we found out that 20,000 X-rays and scans may need to be carried out again because a computer misread a shorthand symbol for the words ‘less than’. Mistakes occur in every walk of human life. It’s in learning lifelong lessons from them that medicine often fails to distinguish itself.

Bike Room

Wexford County Council has been out doing its bit for cyclists this summer, with new signs advising motorists to allow a one-and-a-half-metre gap when they are passing by. That might not sound like a lot, until you translate it into feet and realise that it rounds off to almost five feet of road room. That is no easy margin, when overgrown hedgerows force bikes out in the middle of the lane anyhow. Not to mention the overhanging trees left untrimmed in decades that plunge many rural roads into 24-hour darkness. Fancy signs with impracticable demands are a very poor disguise for unmaintained highways and byways.