A TD has claimed that a constituent who thought she may have been experiencing a threatened miscarriage following a bleed had to wait an entire weekend before being able to access a hospital scan, only to then be examined in a non-private storeroom within the facility.
The incident that is alleged to have taken place at Cavan General Hospital in January was highlighted in a report by the Anglo Celt at the time.
The TD also claims that another woman came to see her after she underwent a threatened miscarriage on a Friday while being just over three months pregnant.
When the constituent went to Cavan General Hospital however, it was Monday before she could be scanned to establish whether she was having a miscarriage because no sonographers available to operate the scanning equipment over the weekend.
The information was placed on the record of the Dáil by TD for Cavan-Monaghan Pauline Tully.
Responding to the claims, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said that while he was “obviously not familiar with the case,” “it does not sound right.”
The minister went on to state that the health service was “in the middle of a very fundamental shift in healthcare provision in respect of exactly the situation that woman found herself in.”
He further noted that Irish hospitals are moving from a five-day week service to a seven-day week hospital service, but that hospitals which are open at the weekends do not provide all the services that are available during weekdays.
He said the new consultant contract is part of a series of reforms aimed at rectifying this deficit in service provision, as is the hiring of 25,000 more staff, but “it takes time. It is a huge shift from five days to seven day’s but it is essential for all the reasons that lady the Deputy described seems to have experienced.”
Gript has previously broken the story of how a pregnant woman almost died after she had taken prescribed abortion pills while unbeknownst to her, her child was being carried in an ectopic pregnancy.
The lack of ultrasound scanning in that instance has led to renewed calls for a nationwide roll-out of the service to determine gestational age and potential ectopic pregnancies.