Kate must carry some blame for A&E shame

I’m not sure how long Fine Gael TD Kate O’Connell has been at the parenting game but I’d have thought it was long enough for her to accumulate a good stash of hairraising A&E stories. Like most Irish mammies I have mine, the best or rather worst of which rather dwarf the Fine Gael deputy’s frustrating ordeal. O’Connell and her child spent several hours in Crumlin’s emergency department before giving up and going home. Me? I was so schooled in what to expect at Temple Street, that I let my sick son writhe in agony and vomit all night long rather than face the horror story.

When his childminder saw him the following day she volunteered for the task.

The upshot was an emergency call at work from a surgeon seeking to discuss my poor son’s perforated appendix and the necessity of operating on him immediately.

Long story short, the child’s appendix had burst the previous day or night when I was busy trying to convince myself he had a 24-hour stomach bug.

As he was vomiting into a yellow bowl I didn’t see that the bile was discoloured. We were in hospital for a week until he recovered from an operation that, had I done right by him, should only have taken two days.

I’m ashamed of my great parenting fail, but at the same time I console myself in so far as I’m not to blame for the A&E crisis.

THE only thing I can do about it is highlight it in this newspaper which I have on umpteen occasions. I have written of the time one of my parents turned back on seeing the state of the casualty department at Beaumont hospital, and headed home, suffering from a suspected stroke.

I have written about my other experiences in A&E, of the kind-hearted staff who push themselves to the limit in what often resemble scenes from M*A*S*H, of the work-shy personnel who stare into space while the families of patients scurry around looking for wheelchairs or pillows as if they were needles in a haystack.

I have written of the members of the public who go there unnecessarily or are loud, drunk or abusive, piling stress onto a system that is creaking at the seams. Or the foul bathrooms, filthy equipment, the soul-destroying absence of creature comfort to ease the pain and fear.

But even without all my first-hand experiences of A&E, I’d have heard enough horror stories from friends and family to know the ropes. I would have expected that Kate O’Connell, a pharmacist who is married to a son of the O’Connell’s Late Night Pharmacy chain, would also know enough not to be dumbfounded at the state of the emergency department at Crumlin.

O’Connell is fortunate in that unlike most of us who can do nothing but complain, she is in a position of power. She has the ear of the Minister for Health and the Taoiseach who can address the crisis at the stroke of a pen, and has run for election on a platform of medical know-how and promising to fight for reform.

SO WHY doesn’t she do that instead of taking a leaf out of the Taoiseach’s tired playbook and wringing her hands in despair as if she’s just an innocent bystander in the rotten hospital emergency system? When Leo Varadkar was Health Minister he was so fond of discussing the trolley and hospital overcrowding crisis as if he was a detached analyst, that it became a standing joke. He ‘felt’ for the elderly waiting for a hospital bed, and agreed it was ‘unacceptable’ in this day and age.

But here we go again. Kate O’Connell is ‘embarrassed’ by the shambles at Crumlin. Aren’t we all Kate. Aren’t we all.

➤➤ THE thousands of students who follow in Prince William’s footsteps by taking a geography degree were doubtless annoyed at Oxford geography professor Danny Dorling’s dismissing the subject as the soft option for the ‘posh but dim’. How insulting of him. Rather than nit-picking about social class and intelligence, he should be grateful that any young student signs up for a snoozefest like geography.