Politicians must suffer A&E fear for themselves

THE harrowing full details of teenager Aoife Johnston’s death at the A&E department of University Hospital Limerick that unfolded at her inquest this week provoked this response from a patient who writes about her experiences at the Emergency Department of St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin three times in the last six months.

YOU could not invent a worse form of torture than the accident of and emergency rooms of Ireland’s hospitals. Take someone when they’re at their most vulnerable; often in extreme pain and sometimes with a potentially fatal condition and make them sit on a hard chair for not one but two whole nights with no sleep, no food, no drinks and no one by their side to advocate for them or even comfort them.

I read about what happened to Aoife Johnston this week and understood exactly what she and her family went through because I had a near identical ‘war-zone’ experience.

The first time I was there I waited 36 hours before seeing a doctor and I had a perforated gall bladder, in other words a life-threatening emergency.

The poor young doctor was visibly shaken by it; he apologised that it had taken so long to identify the gravity of it. He explained that they hadn’t seen anything in the bloods and it wasn’t until the scan made it to the surgical team that they realised how bad it was. He added that sometimes there is a lag before it shows in the bloods.

It was the same in Aoife’s case. While this was happening, there was a woman on the floor vomiting bile and wailing in pain. She had been released the previous day following a burst appendix and was back with complications. She, likewise, was there for two nights.

I got so worried about her I begged a nurse to get a doctor instead of doing a roll call to establish how many people had given up and gone home and could be scratched off the waiting list. The lady on the floor ended up in an acute ward beside me for an urgent operation. Madness.

In the waiting room, it was like a war zone, people in various states of distress and illness. Because no medics were helping us, there was an esprit de corps, and we all tried to help each other.

We were sharing our little bits of food. A lovely poor young man who was a methadone addict with an infection, cleaned up the blood off the floor on his hands and knees when an old man’s cannula fell off and his blood literally came pumping and squirting out of him all over the seats and floor (he was on blood thinners). No staff came to clean it.

A Japanese woman who appeared to be in her 80s was visibly shocked. Her pregnant daughter had sneaked into the waiting room to be with her during her two-day wait to see a doctor. She sat on the floor for the entire time because patients – even in dire circumstances – are not allowed to be accompanied because there aren’t enough seats.

The nurses hide behind closed doors because they are scared of the abuse they’ll get if they venture into the waiting room and all they can say is there are no doctors. I understand that.

Why would doctors stay in Ireland when they are treated properly elsewhere?

Politicians need to sit in A&E in agony for days on rock-hard chairs with no food to feel what it’s like.

They have signs all over the hospitals warning about sepsis, that it can be fatal and what the warning signs are. But I could have died from it that night, and so could the women writhing in agony on the floor beside me.

If you don’t resource your A&E departments properly, people will die. It’s inexcusable in a country which has had huge budget surpluses for almost two decades.

And this is what happens – a gorgeous young girl dies.