Former Master Of Holles Street Slams Irish Maternity Services

Two of the country's leading obstetricians issued stark warnings about Irelands "unacceptable level of risk" to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health which resumed this morning to consider Ireland's National Maternity Strategy. UCC's Professor of obstetrics Louise Kenny and former Master of the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, Dr Peter Boylan, told the Committee that they have serious concerns about the fact that neither specialist ultrasound nor foetal medicine services are available to all pregnant women in this country. Dr Boylan, a highly respected consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist who has delivered over six thousand babies, informed the Oireachtas Committee that there is a disparity in ultrasound availability for pregnant women in Ireland:

"We wish to see all units have access to expert ultrasonography services for all pregnant women. At the moment there is a huge variation in availability of ultrasound for pregnant women around the country. This has serious implications for the quality of care which can be given to women in pregnancy."

The former Chair of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists also slammed the current governance of maternity hospitals as a failure:

"The current governance model whereby maternity units around the country are integrated into the general hospitals is a failure. Recent problems in Cork and Portlaoise are good examples of this. This has been demonstrated repeatedly over the past several years by well documented tragedies."

Professor Louise Kenny, a renowned expert in maternal complications and editor of one of the world’s leading medical textbooks on obstetrics told the Oireachtas group that babies lives were being put at risk:

"In Cork we are two and a half hours by road from Dublin. If a baby is born with hypoplastic left heart it needs to assessed immediately after birth and transferred to specialist services. If that baby has been unidentified prior to birth because of the lack of the twenty or twenty-two week scan, the whole process has to take place ex-utero with a critically ill baby in an ambulance. That is the most disadvantaged start that child will have and will absolutely have an impact on its chances of survival. That is a devastating event for a family."

The Joint Committee on Health has gathered representatives of the Health Service Executive (HSE), the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (IOG) and the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) to examine the future of the country's maternity strategy up until 2026. The committee's chairman, Dr. Michael Harty TD, said:

"The National Maternity Strategy is an important document that sets out a roadmap for an improvement to services for women, families and fathers. It is important to recognise that the maternity services currently in place are of a good standard but service deficits do exist and we look forward to hearing more from the bodies involved about how the four strategic priorities, identified in this report, are being implemented. This strategy proposes a fundamental overhaul of services - towards and integrated, team based care model - and we welcome the opportunity to hear how this impacts upon those represented by the HSE, IOG and the INMO."

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