It’s not enough just to blame the staff

DAYS after the publication of the HIQA report into the Midland Regional Hospital Portlaoise, the findings seem no less disturbing.

It is bad enough in itself that babies delivered in the hospital’s maternity unit died because staff failed to spot signs of foetal distress during labour. But the way in which the grieving families were treated almost defies belief.

The 208-page report found that some mothers were reprimanded for crying, even though they had just been through a traumatic experience. Others had to endure seeing the remains of their newborn wheeled out from the mortuary in a metal box draped with a white sheet. In one case, a deceased baby boy had been squeezed into a box because it wasn’t big enough for his body.

If we were told of this happening in a Third World nation, we, as a people, would be quite rightly outraged. But to hear of it occurring in our own country is beyond shocking.

Now HSE director general Tony O’Brien has acknowledged that there appears to be ‘a significant lack of compassion’ in the Portlaoise maternity unit and, for that matter, the broader system.

He has also indicated that there will be a review to establish whether there are people working in the health service who shouldn’t be. It seems abundantly clear from what we have already heard that there are indeed HSE employees who aren’t suited to the job. Accordingly, it is only correct that they should face appropriate consequences.

Yet if Mr O’Brien thinks this alone amounts to an adequate response, then he is very much mistaken. Given that the distressing incidents at Portlaoise happened over a prolonged period, it is clear that this was a management failure as much as anything else.

We need to know if there were policies for staff dealing with bereavements and, if so, what training they received.

It is simply not good enough for Mr O’Brien to confine remedial action to weeding out unsympathetic frontline staff. Yes, those whose levels of compassion were lacking deserve to be punished. But given that we are talking about gross management failure here, so do the people who were in charge. Nor will shuffling them around into other positions be an acceptable solution.

The HSE needs to grasp the nettle by getting rid of the people who shouldn’t be there and, at this late stage in the day, putting proper management structures in place. Putting it bluntly, Portlaoise isn’t just a case of a few rotten apples. It’s an entire regime rotten to the core.