It is shocking that in a country awash with money the Government is incapable of funding the installation of sufficient single rooms in our hospitals to prevent the spread of infections such as MRSA, an Irish missionary priest said yesterday.
Fr Brendan Forde was speaking two days after the funeral of his sister Barbara (67), who picked up MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant superbug, after being operated on in a Dublin hospital.
"You get great tax breaks if you build luxury hotels for the super-rich but they are incapable of building in our hospitals some individual units for the most vulnerable people, those who are in intensive care, and they will put them into a ward where there are hospital-acquired infections," he said.
"We can spend our millions or our billions on stadiums and everything and we are not capable of doing that. I just kind of think it's a question of our values and I think it is horrific and obscene that they don't care for the most vulnerable patients," he added.
Fr Forde said his sister went into Beaumont Hospital for "an ordinary operation" on a blocked intestine at the end of October. She was getting over the operation and he was about to return to his work in Colombia on November 5th when he got a call to say she had developed pneumonia and had been admitted to the intensive care unit.
She was in the unit with other patients for about five weeks, where, he understands, she picked up MRSA and VRE, another hospital-acquired infection. She died last Sunday.
Fr Forde told The Irish Times he believed Barbara would still be alive today if she hadn't gone in to hospital.
At her funeral Mass on Wednesday he told the congregation he was very angry, because he believed Barbara didn't have to die. "She went in for an ordinary operation and she came out dead from a hospital-acquired infection, which we were told was MRSA. I find it a disgrace and abomination in a country where we have so much money that the Government doesn't know what to do with it," he said.
"This isn't going to bring Barbara back but I would like maybe in the tragedy of her death that it will in some way wake up people to the fact that there should be a far better system."
He stressed he had no criticism of the doctors and nurses at Beaumont, who were wonderful. "The whole system isn't fair to them. They are fighting . . . it's not fair for them to be working under those circumstances either," he said.
"How can it be that somebody goes in for an operation and they are in intensive care and you bring them into a ward that's riddled with MRSA? I mean that's not fair, it can't be.
"I would be afraid if I had to go in for an operation now, I would think twice about it. I'd be very afraid, not on account of the competence of the doctors and the nurses, but on account of the structure they have to work under."
Barbara, who lived in Clontarf, Dublin, and worked for many years with Bord Fáilte, was "a gutsy woman", he recalls. She visited him several times in Latin America, where he has worked for 35 years.
"She was on the first plane that arrived in Chile after the military coup about 30 years ago . . . she was instrumental with other people in bringing the first Chilean refugees here to Ireland," he said.
The Forde family are awaiting the results of her postmortem.
A spokesman for Beaumont Hospital said last evening the hospital extended its sympathy to her family but for reasons of confidentiality could not comment on individual cases.