A FORMER master of the National Maternity Hospital at Holles St has said those in charge of the health services had known for 20 years about the inadequacy of the infrastructure of Dublin’s three main maternity hospitals but had done “precious little” about it.
Dr Peter Boylan said the hospitals were under pressure having to deal with significant increases in births and more complicated deliveries every year. This had resulted in a number of “near misses”.
“Right across the board, the infrastructure is inadequate. We’ve known about this, the Department of Health have known about this, successive ministers have known about this for the last 20 years at least.
“But precious little has been done apart from a series of reports which effectively gather dust,” he told yesterday’s This Week programme on RTÉ Radio.
Dr Boylan added that the three main maternity hospitals in Dublin – the Rotunda, the Coombe and Holles Street – should all be on the sites of general hospitals.
Holles Street, he pointed out, could have moved to St Vincent’s hospital a number of years ago. “Both hospitals agreed. But of course getting agreement from the Department of Health, well you’ve got the dead hand there, I’m afraid, of any kind of initiative, which just buries any kind of ideal of entrepreneurial approach of solving our problems,” he said.
He said he had given up on the prospect of improvements. “We’ve had a series of dysfunctional ministers . . . Brian Cowen was utterly hopeless as a minister for health, Micheál Martin was known as the minister for reports, Mary Harney basically, it’s not been a success.”
Last December the master of the Coombe, Dr Chris Fitzpatrick, also said there had been a number of “near misses” for both mothers and babies at Dublin’s maternity hospitals as a result of staffing shortages.
“We have a shortage of midwives, doctors and support staff . . . there are also infrastructural deficiencies,” he said.