Around one third of pregnant women in Kerry leave the county each year to have their babies in Cork and Limerick hospitals, although the county's general hospital in Tralee now had one of the best maternity services in the south, a public meeting heard on Monday night, writes Anne Lucey
The best way to keep a county hospital was not simply to maintain services but to expand, speakers said at the meeting organized by the Kerry Women's Forum to discuss fears for future services at Tralee General Hospital.
The expansion of maternity services was pivotal to attracting specialist clinics. The experience in Bantry, west Cork, since its maternity unit closed, was that visiting consultants simply did not come to the hospital, said Dr Mary McCaffrey, consultant obstetrician/gynaecologist at Tralee. She is the only female obstetrician/gynaecologist in the public service in the Southern Health Board. She was speaking in a personal capacity.
Mr Thomas Jimmy Livingstone, of the Monaghan Hospital Retention Committee and the grandfather of baby Bronagh Livingstone, whose mother was refused treatment at Monaghan General Hospital, was a guest speaker at the meeting. He urged people "not to take their eye off the ball". The downgrading of Monaghan could happen any county's hospital, he said.
The closure of 30 beds at Tralee this summer, and the reduction in some outpatients' clinics, mirrored what had happened in Monaghan, where now the only maternity care in Monaghan was "into the back of an ambulance", Mr Livingstone said. Plans for a new self-contained maternity unit are being submitted to the Department of Health, as the 1970s style maternity unit was "bursting at the seams" and built for a different era, Dr McCaffrey announced.
There was no question of closing the maternity unit in Tralee, she said. But the new unit would only become a reality if "the public stop moving out", Dr McCaffrey said. A record number of women - 1,458, up from a low of 1,138 in 1998 - gave birth at Tralee last year, of which a small number were asylum-seekers.
Some 201 Kerry women gave birth at the Bon Secours, in Cork, last year compared with 236 the previous year, and the same was true of 190 Kerry births at other Cork hospitals. Some 31 Kerry women gave birth at Limerick General Hospital.