Maternity services at Wexford General Hospital will resume at 9am on Friday with outpatients appointments set to go ahead as scheduled from Monday after a fire broke out on Wednesday. Around half of the facility’s roughly 200 beds are unusable for the foreseeable future as a result of the incident.
Staff turned up as usual for work on Thursday at the hospital from which about 200 patients had been evacuated during the incident. Twenty-nine patients continued to receive treatment onsite with a decision to allow them to remain after it had been established on Thursday morning that large parts of the hospital were safe with critical services including electricity and oxygen supply functioning normally.
Damage to only a small portion of the building’s roof was visible from the outside and work was clearly continuing in most parts of the facility which provides maternity, emergency and a wide range of other medical services to the population of a substantial catchment area in the southeast.
Assessments of the damage continued through Thursday as managers sought to confirm how the fire had started and to establish a timeline for safely reopening portions of the hospital. General manager Linda O’Leary said late in the afternoon that it had been decided maternity services could resume and that news, along with the resumption of outpatients services from the start of next week, was subsequently confirmed in a statement from the hospital. In it, expectant mothers were advised they could contact the labour ward at 053 9153368 if they had queries in relation to their care.
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Ms O’Leary said she hoped the process of assessing the damage would be complete by late on Thursday evening after which work could proceed on establishing a timeline for repairs and the safe reopening off all of the hospital’s facilities. “After that assessment, there will be other work to be done and the full extent of what’s involved and how long it will take is not known at the moment,” she said.
As it was, she said, staff had been busy over the course of the day updating information systems, appointment schedules and tracking patients. “There was a regrouping of staff and the senior management team too, and significant meetings scheduled over the course of the day.”
It had been suggested earlier that some of the 200 or so patients transferred to other hospitals in Waterford, Dublin, Cork and elsewhere could be moved back to Wexford General over the coming days as the necessary services are functioning in significant portions of the hospital.
The hospital’s clinical director, Prof Obada Taha Yousif, said as the various assessments were completed, it would become clearer “what services we can bring back and how quickly we can bring them back but it has to be done in a safe manner for our patients and in a co-ordinated way so that we don’t lose any patient in the process. The safety of our patients is of primary importance.”
Earlier, Leo Varadkar said efforts would be made to get those patients who had been relocated “home as soon as possible”.
[ Wexford hospital patient: ‘You could smell smoke and the alarms were going off’Opens in new window ]
The Taoiseach thanked emergency personnel and staff who evacuated the hospital saying: “They fought the blaze valiantly and are successfully transferring more than 200 patients to other locations and I think we’re blessed that nobody was injured or worse.” He said this was a “testament to the heroism and dedication of all those involved”.
Mr Varadkar, who will visit the hospital on Friday, said the facility “can and will recover and will be back to full service as soon as is possible”. He said the “full restoration of all services might take some time”, but that, he said, was the objective and the Government would “do whatever is required” in the aftermath of the incident.
