Children the latest victims in a shockingly familiar story
CHILDREN and their parents were entitled to trust all of those people involved in providing dangerous and complicated spinal surgeries at Temple Street Children’s Hospital. Without that trust, not a single operation would have taken place. Those children and parents would have expected that current best protocols were being observed, and that general and accepted practices were top-notch – that they were in good hands.
They would have been certain that expert medical professionals at Temple Street were constantly hitting the books, journals, the latest research material and the like as part of their continuous professional development, and that the relevant management would be chasing down statistics from all over the world about success and failure in spinal surgery procedures of the kind provided at the hospital.
FOR that reason, parents and their children would have felt assured that if anything went even slightly off-kilter at Temple Street – such as failures, repeat surgeries and infections – that red flags would go up all over the place at the speed of light.
More particularly, children and their parents would have been certain that only approved material could be implanted in their little bodies – such devices having passed the most detailed certification process imaginable.
Tragically, it appears that all that trust was misplaced.
Incredibly, unauthorised devices were implanted into children’s backs, and now Temple Street has admitted that 13 out of 16 children who had spinal surgery there needed to endure a lot more surgery due to complications.
Why was such a rate of complications not noticed earlier, despite these children having to return to theatre 11 times on average to sort things out, with one child returning a staggering 33 times? Why did nobody shout ‘STOP’ well before all that pain and suffering, worry and trauma simply became too much to avoid? And if somebody did, why were they ignored?
In truth, we all know perfectly well why this extraordinary failure occurred at Temple Street, because it’s just the latest chapter in a shockingly familiar story. There is no proper accountability for any single individual in the way the various State bureaucracies organise themselves. And this lack of such accountability has disfigured the healthcare system for decades and destroyed lives and families all over the country.
In the 1970s and ’80s more than 250 haemophiliacs were infected here with HIV and Hepatitis C because of contaminated blood products sourced from paid donors, including prisoners and drug addicts in the United States. The Lindsay Tribunal that investigated this Blood Transfusion Service disaster found that blood products were given to haemophiliacs even after the risks of infection were discovered. About 100 people died and nobody was held accountable.
More recently the Cervical Check scandal, in which over 221 women who developed cancer were kept in the dark that previous smear tests had been checked and were deemed false negatives, further undermined trust in the healthcare system. As in the contaminated blood catastrophe, people died but nobody was meaningfully held to account.
IN JANUARY of last year the report by Dr Seán Maskey into the CAMHS calamity in Kerry found that 46 vulnerable children had been significantly harmed by drugs prescribed to them, with 240 put at risk. Concerns about medication were made clear in 2019, but changes were not imposed. More lives destroyed and, again, nobody held to account.
The constant refrain is an apologetic, mournful plea from the HSE that blames the system. Failure at organisational level, a bureaucratic mess-up, is the get-out-of-jail card they’ve always used and are likely to use again in relation to the Temple Street fiasco. Once more, nobody will be held to account.
It’s no wonder that no matter how many scandals are revealed, no lessons are learned, and no real change occurs.
Time is the only thing that separates us now from the next tragedy. And that’s running out.