Radio host Pat Kenny has shared details of what he described as his daughter’s “terrible experience” in the emergency department at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin.
Kenny said he and his wife, Cathy, took one of their two daughters to hospital after she “bumped her head” and “was unconscious for several minutes”.
The host of Newstalk raised the issue with Health Minister Stephen Donnelly as he discussed the wide range of issues facing the health service, including the pressures hospitals are expected to face this winter.
“My own terrible experience at St. Vincent’s Hospital with my daughter over the summer doesn’t give me great optimism about how things will be in the winter,” said Mr. Kenny.
“My concern was evident with my daughter who fell, hit her head, blood flowed, was unconscious for several minutes and was not monitored for vital signs all night.
“They said, ‘You’re going to have a scan in the morning’, but by then luckily she wasn’t, but she could have been dead with a brain hemorrhage… Then a doctor has the audacity to say to my wife, when the bandage was off and my daughter said ‘please put it back on as it will ease the discomfort’ he handed her a new bandage and said ‘do it yourself’.
In response, Minister Donnelly said: “That doesn’t sound right.”
“But those are people who have run out of empathy, to be honest, no more road, no more empathy,” Kenny added.
To tackle wait times in emergency departments, Minister Donnelly said the health service is recruiting more emergency room consultants.
“One of the things I’ve been through when I went to the emergency room at 11 or 12 at night, you have a lot of patients on trolleys, a lot of patients waiting for a decision on whether to be admitted, or whether to go home can be sent, but there are no consultants because historically we haven’t had enough emergency medicine consultants,” he said.
“So I recently sanctioned an additional 51 counselors to go to hospitals across the country. That’s a start, we need to go beyond that… It’s all well and good that there’s a physician assistant and she work very hard, but in the end it is the emergency medicine consultants who can make those decisions better than anyone else.
In a statement released to Independent.ie, said a spokesperson for the Sint-Vincentius Hospital: “SVUH does not comment on individual patients to third parties. We are committed to providing our patients with the highest standards of care so that we can achieve the best patient health outcomes.
“We are the only Level 4 hospital in Ireland to undergo a three-year independent assessment by the international accreditation body JCI of the quality of care we provide; and we encourage all patients to provide us with direct feedback so that we can continuously improve the quality of care services in our hospital.
“We take every complaint very seriously and our patient advice and support team is committed to supporting patients who are not satisfied with their care experience at our hospital.”
Health Minister Stephen Donnelly.
Minister Donnelly said the HSE will also begin its “big push” to tackle ‘twin disease’ with the launch of the flu vaccine and the third Covid-19 vaccines for everyone aged 65 and over and people with weakened immune systems.
“So the next big step now Monday week 3 October. The flu vaccine is free for an awful lot of groups, the COVID vaccine is free for everyone and really my question and the question from our public health workers is that everyone go and get the COVID vaccine [and] getting the flu vaccine,” he said.
“We need all the health workers to get the vaccine and there has never been mandatory vaccination in Ireland and it’s not something we like. There has been a lot of work hospital by hospital to raise rates and some hospitals have done them” Very good. It has increased quite a bit over the years. This year it is more important than ever because this year we are dealing with a perfect storm. “
Minister Donnelly said Ireland’s “incredible” health workers have been “battered and stressed” for two and a half years and “it is going to be a difficult winter” for them.
He said the government’s position is that “all private” hospital capacity “should be used” as needed for public patients in the coming months.
“There is a good relationship between the public and the private systems. What I repeated to the HSE last night was that we should use every private bed, every private MRI, DEXA scanner, X-ray, nursing bed, community bed. This winter requires the mobilization of the entire health care system, the public and the private system,” he added.
Meanwhile, he said the government is awaiting the findings of an HSE assessment of the emergency hospital at Navan Hospital.
Minister Donnelly said the clinical team at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda told him that the proposal to divert critically ill patients to Louth Hospital was not possible given their current resources.
“I would never stand in a situation where patient risk was simply transferred from one hospital to another because that doesn’t work for the patient,” he said.