Sinn Féin spokesperson on Health, David Cullinane, and TD for Limerick, Maurice Quinlivan, have described the Clarke Report into the death of Aoife Johnston as heartbreaking, and extended their sympathies to Ms Johnston’s family.
Deputy Cullinane said the report, which found that Ms Johnston’s death was ‘almost certainly avoidable’, and major population changes in the MidWest over the last decade show that there is a compelling case for a second Model 3 hospital with an emergency department in the MidWest, and that a major and urgent expansion in capacity across the MidWest is needed to end the crisis at UHL.
Speaking this evening, Teachta Cullinane said:
“The conclusion of the Clarke Report that Aoife Johnston’s death was ‘almost certainly avoidable’ is heartbreaking. My thoughts are with her family, friends, and loved ones, whose pain is unimaginable.
“The report is devastating in its critique of the closure of emergency departments in Ennis and Nenagh, a chronic lack of capacity at UHL, and a litany of failures in management and adherence to sepsis protocols.
“Aoife faced delay at every stage, from admission, triage, and assessment, to treatment, which left her waiting for more than 13 hours for care which should have been administered immediately, since her GP had already identified sepsis risk.
“Mr Clarke draws a very clear link between the closure of emergency departments in Ennis and Nenagh, when Aoife was just a small child, and the perpetual crisis at University Hospital Limerick today.
“Fifteen years later, capacity at UHL is still below the recommended level before the closure of Ennis and Nenagh, and has not kept up in any way with population growth and demographic changes.”
Teachta Quinlivan said:
“It has been known for the last fifteen years that UHL was in need of major expansion to serve as the sole major hospital for the MidWest.
“A litany of failures in management meant that, despite the emergency department being massively overcrowded, escalation and crisis management protocols were not implemented.
“As a result, Aoife was placed in the wrong part of the hospital because the resuscitation area, where she should have been as a suspected sepsis patient, ‘was already grossly overcrowded’.
“It seems that management did not have a back-up plan for this eventuality, and that a reliance on a pen and paper system in the middle of a crisis meant that staff could not be aware of or properly respond to Aoife’s condition.
“The lack of a back-up plan for the resuscitation area in particular, and the single-point-of-failure that is UHL ED as a whole, mean that there were no services available to support UHL during a crisis.”
Teachta Cullinane added:
“Aoife’s case and major population changes in the MidWest over the last decade show that there is a compelling case for a second Model 3 hospital with an emergency department in the MidWest. Emergency and urgent care services must keep pace with population changes, be clinically underpinned, and above all else, safe.
“A major and urgent expansion in capacity across the MidWest is needed to end the crisis at UHL. While a new emergency department is being assessed and developed, UHL will continue to be the only ED in the region. A major injection of bed capacity is needed urgently. This is an emergency and it should be responded to as an emergency.
“All of the recommendations contained in the Clarke report must be urgently implemented in full. These include common sense measures, such as a role for GPs in treating suspected sepsis prehospital, better triaging in the ED, improved use of IT systems to flag sepsis in patients and other serious conditions, and prompt administration of medication in the ED once it is prescribed.”
