WAITING TIMES for cardiac surgery at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, are now posing a risk to children, a consultant paediatric cardiologist there said yesterday.
Dr Paul Oslizlok, who is also president of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association, said a shortage of intensive care beds meant children’s heart operations were now being cancelled on a weekly basis. “It’s getting to crisis point,” he said. Dr Oslizlok said waiting times had been brought down to below three months but were now once again “getting up to six months” which he said “for many children is simply too long”.
Referring to the case of a Limerick toddler who died after being sent home from the hospital in 2003 after her heart operation was postponed due to a shortage of intensive care nurses to look after her following surgery, he said: “We have got another potential Róisín Ruddle on our doorsteps if we don’t act now. We are very worried really. We really haven’t experienced a situation like this for well over a decade and we are not even in the worst throes of the recession yet.”
Dr Oslizlok said the main problem was a shortage of intensive care beds. “The number of children who need cardiac surgery is increasing each year . . . and we simply do not have the capacity of intensive care beds.”
He said a review of intensive care bed capacity for the Health Service Executive found there was a critical shortage in Dublin, particularly in Crumlin, but the report had not been acted on.
In a statement last night the HSE said it had been working with the paediatric hospitals to improve the critical care services in the interim pending the opening of the new national paediatric hospital.
“A paediatric critical care network has been established to facilitate this work and additional service pressure funding has been allocated this year to the paediatric hospitals to progress additional consultant intensivist posts which have been approved recently. It is expected that these additional posts will be in place in early 2010,” it said.
Figures obtained by Fine Gael’s health spokesman Dr James Reilly showed nearly 9,000 operations were cancelled in the first six months of this year. Dr Reilly said this was a 27 per cent increase on the same period in 2008.
The HSE said the increase cited by Dr Reilly was linked to the increase in activity rather than a significant increase in cancellations alone. The cancellations, which it said were to give way to emergency cases, represented just 1.4 per cent of overall activity.
Dr Oslizlok said it was totally unacceptable that more operations were being cancelled year on year.
“It would seem that there is a problem that hasn’t been dealt with and there are consultants throughout the country that are ready to operate but are unable to do so for a variety of reasons, and often that reason is there isn’t an intensive care bed available or a post-operative bed available or perhaps other frontline staff are not available in the hospital,” he said.
In addition he said there simply weren’t sufficient step-down beds and as a result hundreds of patients were having their hospital discharge delayed. Until this was sorted there would continue to be operations cancelled, he said.