People in the South Eastern Health Board area will no longer have to travel to Dublin or Cork for specialist eye surgery following the appointment of a consultant ophthalmologist at Waterford Regional Hospital.
The surgeon has a special interest in vitreo/retinal surgery and will offer new procedures at the hospital including retinal detachment surgery.
Mr Stephen Beatty, who took up his post on August 1st, said he expected to deal with 75 retinal detachments annually as well as other retina diseases which require surgery. The retina is a layer of tissue covering the back of the eye. Sometimes it peels off the inside wall of the eye and failure to reattach it quickly can mean permanent blindness.
Mr Beatty said successfully reattaching the retina was "a race against time". The longer it remained detached, the harder it was to reattach. Therefore, the establishment of this service in the south-east, which will eliminate travel to Dublin or Cork for patients requiring the procedure, was very important.
He hopes to initiate a photodynamic therapy service. This is a laser surgery for treatment of age-related macular degeneration, the commonest cause of blindness in the Western world.
Meanwhile, it is not known when the intensive care unit at St James's Hospital, Dublin, will reopen. The unit was closed on Friday following the spread of a potentially fatal "superbug" among some patients.
A hospital spokesman said yesterday the situation continued to be monitored. Two infected patients remain in a critical condition. New admissions to St James's requiring intensive care treatment are being redirected to other parts of the hospital. Such a resistant strain of the bug, acinetobacter baumanii was never before identified in an Irish hospital and is believed to have been brought into St James's by a patient who was treated abroad.
A plea by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service for extra blood donations over the bank holiday weekend has failed to yield the desired result. A spokeswoman said the blood bank could feel comfortable only if it had 1,900 units set aside at a time. The number of units has fallen short of this target and hospitals may be asked to cancel elective surgery in coming weeks if the situation does not improve, she said.
Planned elective work at the Longford/Westmeath General Hospital has been reduced "for the present" due to nurse shortages, the hospital's manager, Mr Joe Martin, confirmed in a letter to members of the Midland Health Board.
He said the hospital had no waiting lists for elective procedures at present and the health board's aim was "to return to this position as soon as normal services are resumed". Five beds have been closed. "The situation regarding the closed beds will be reviewed on an ongoing basis in tandem with the availability of nursing staff," Mr Martin said.
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Hospital Watch special: http://www.ireland.com/special/hospital