Patients will die as an “inevitable consequence” of repeated critical incidents at Navan hospital, senior staff at the hospital have warned.
Senior managers in Navan have written to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly to draw his attention to “yet another critical incident” in the hospital’s emergency department.
The incident highlighted “yet again” the risks faced by critically ill patients coming to Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan (OLHN), they told the Minister.
The Health Service Executive’s plans to turn Navan’s emergency department into a medical assessment unit and to divert critically ill patients to other hospitals are currently being reviewed by a taskforce. Its report is expected to be published soon.
Critical care services
“OLHN does not have the critical care services to provide these critically ill patients with the best opportunity of survival. Consequently this incident resulted in an unnecessary delay in the patient receiving the most appropriate investigation and treatment,” Navan’s senior staff wrote in the letter.
While the patient was successfully stabilised and has survived to date, the managers said the event was one of a number of critical incidents to have occurred in the emergency department over the past six months.
“The inevitable consequences of these repeated critical incidents is patient death(s)”, hospital manager Anita Brennan; clinical director Gerry McEntee; director of nursing Dearbhala Cassidy; and quality, patient safety and operations manager Ruth Tighe, wrote in July. The letter was obtained under freedom of information by LMFM radio.
Plans to move some services out of Navan for safety reasons have been in gestation for over a decade. In June, the HSE announced it planned to divert patients away from the Navan’s emergency department and to transfer intensive care capacity to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital Drogheda. Mr Donnelly instructed the HSE not to proceed with the plan, due to happen at the end of June, until its impact on other services in the region was reviewed.
The HSE said it expected the taskforce, which includes representatives of Navan, Drogheda and Connolly hospitals, to complete its work shortly. “For the relatively short time that their work is ongoing, we don’t want to comment publicly,” a spokeswoman said.
