Limerick Independent TD Richard O’Donoghue has called for the managers of University Hospital Limerick to step down after a 16-year-old girl passed away in the A&E department of the hospital last January.
An inquiry has been launched into this second tragedy which happened only weeks after Aoife Johnson – also 16 – died in the hospital’s emergency department from bacterial meningitis in December 2022, two days after she first presented at the A&E.
Reporting for the Irish Independent, Eavan Murray wrote, “The 16-year-old girl died suddenly on January 29, hours after she was rushed to UHL suffering from breathing difficulties. The girl, a much-loved only child, died in front of her mother in what an informed source described as “deeply traumatic circumstances”.
The girl had been admitted to UHL with a severe chest infection in early January where she had received treatment for over two weeks before being discharged.
Murray reported that it is understood this latest death happened after the girl had initially been admitted to the resuscitation area with breathing difficulties on the 29th of January but was moved into a corridor area after being deemed well enough to leave the resuscitation area.
As the girl’s condition worsened amid desperate pleas from her “anguished” mother she was moved back to the resuscitation area where “her condition deteriorated rapidly” and despite “prolonged efforts” to revive her, she passed away.
Describing a “bottleneck” scenario at UHL’s A&E department, TD Richard O’Donoghue said that people in need of urgent medical attention are passing hospitals on the way to UHL, where there is a general understanding among people in the greater Limerick area that they will likely be left waiting for hours on end.
Expressing his condolences to the girl’s family he said that “the structure in the hospital was always wrong.”
“The management in the hospital tried to achieve a hospital of excellence,” he said, explaining how A&E departments in Nenagh and Ennis had been shut in order to centralise accident and emergency patients to UHL.
“One hospital in Limerick cannot deal with the amount of people going in there,” he said, adding that population growth in the area had not been factored in when making the decision to centralise.
“We’re covering Clare, Tipperary, Limerick, North Kerry, and parts of Cork,” he said.
O’Donoghue said that once a patient passes through the A&E department that they are “very well looked after” but that the “bottleneck” created by the absence of more localised A&E departments was resulting in many patients being unable to access treatment “on time”.
He said that he himself had waited in the hospital from 4pm until 5am the next morning when he decided to go home because no bed was available.
“People are passing the hospitals in Ennis, they’re passing the hospitals in Nenagh, and they’re being sent in and then they could be turned around and sent back in to Nenagh or Ennis,” he said, adding that the A&E at UHL was like a “cattle crusher”.
“The population is rising, open up the hospitals!” he said, adding that the population rise was “never taken into account”.
Speaking about how different hospitals in the area had been graded with tiers to dictate what kind of medical needs they can attend to he said, “There are people travelling 40 and 50 miles, people dying on transit coming to the hospital and they pass other hospitals who were given a lower tier,”.
“What they’re doing is they’re burning out the staff that are inside in the hospital now in Limerick”.
O’Donoghue said a nurse at UHL told him that she goes home feeling “broken”, “tired”, and like she “hadn’t done enough”, and how she felt as though she was fighting a fire that keeps getting bigger.
“It’s not fair on the staff and it’s not fair on the patients being brought in,” he said adding that “the system inside there is wrong.”
“The government have been ignoring what I’ve been saying and what other people have been saying for years: that this is unsafe,” he said, commenting on how increased financial support from the government had done nothing to improve the waiting lists at the hospital which he said keeps getting longer.
Expressing his support for staff at the hospital who he said are not to blame for the situation he said, “It’s unsafe for the staff to be working there in those conditions and it’s unsafe for patients coming there putting their lives at risk,”.
He pointed to the case of another teenage girl, Jessica Sheedy, who died after undergoing surgery at UHL in 2018 saying Jessica had ‘never woken up’ from the surgery after a main artery was severed during the procedure.
I was at jessica’s mother and father’s wedding,” he said lamenting that Jessica “had her whole life ahead of her,”
“I can’t believe what it’s like for anyone to lose a child,” he said, adding that there were “no words” he could use to imagine the pain of such a loss.
Questioning whether lessons were being learned after these repeated tragedies he said it was “ soul destroying” to see lives that could have been saved lost through “mistakes”.
Saying that the management at the hospital “needs to go” he questioned whether managers who continually fail to reduce waiting lists at the hospital would be allowed to keep their positions in any other business.