FAMILY REACTION:THE FATHER of Meadhbh McGivern has said his family has its own "back-up plan" in the event that his daughter receives another call for a liver transplant and is failed by State agencies.
Joe McGivern said his first reaction was one of shock to the finding of the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) report that the system for transporting patients abroad for emergency operations was not reliable.
Mr McGivern said his family had retained an air ambulance company based at Weston airport near Dublin to bring his daughter to London if the various State agencies were unable to provide an aircraft in the event of receiving word of another liver becoming available for transplant.
He said the events of July 2nd, when various State bodies failed in attempts to transport Meadhbh to London for surgery, had been “outlined extremely well by the Hiqa team”.
He maintained that what had happened had not been done “with malice”. He said the recommendations would not mean anything “unless they are implemented by the agencies involved and overseen by the Department of Health, and we certainly hope that will happen”.
The report had revealed there was “no single agency or person that had overall accountability for the transportation of transplant recipients or for co-ordinating it”, Mr McGovern noted. “The one sentence that continues to pop out at me was that the system was ‘not designed to be reliable’. This is the stuff of horror shows . . .
“But the details also showed that 76 inter-agency phone calls had been made. They scrambled, they tried hard. There was desperate measures made.”
Mr McGivern noted the report also outlined 21 “critical factors” where there had been a failure in service and in communications, and what he termed “the myriad of assumptions and decisions that were made on the night”.
Mr McGivern said of his daughter: “Her liver is failing. She’s in progressive liver failure, which is the way these things happen. I suppose the most important thing that we have to remember is that she is still on the high priority list in King’s College in London.
“We are going into our second year now on the waiting list. It’s a long time. And I think she holds the honourable title of being the longest child ever on the liver transplant waiting list in Ireland.”