Consultants in the Cork University Hospital (CUH) department of surgery have said they can “no longer participate” in the planning and delivery of a major trauma centre on the campus due to concerns around “current deficits in the delivery of trauma care”.
Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly in April of last year officially opened the State’s two major trauma centres (MTCs) – one at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin and the other at CUH. The centres seek to provide the highest level of specialist trauma care to the most severely injured patients.
Under the plan the country has been divided into two trauma networks – the Central Trauma Network and the South Trauma Network – for dealing with patients who, for example, have head injuries, broken limbs or been injured in car crashes.
The surgeons from CUH are understood to have raised concerns about confusion and disagreement arising around which surgical care teams should take care of seriously injured patients, which they say results in delayed treatment and poor outcomes
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In a letter dated April 12th last, they wrote to David Donergan, CUH chief executive officer, highlighting a number of concerns. The letter said the department has been “engaging regularly” with the MTC planning and implementation process and it “fully” endorses the recommendations of the Trauma System for Ireland report, which was published in 2018.
“We have been increasingly alarmed to find that as a group our experience of the current deficits in the delivery of trauma care and our concerns for the care of severely injured patients who will present to CUH in the future have not been given appropriate consideration by CUH management,” the surgeons said. “The current leadership of the trauma project which does not include any one of our group has departed significantly from key recommendations.”
The letter added that the plans are based on “an experimental physician-led model of trauma care which to our knowledge is unprecedented anywhere in the UK or in Europe where MTCs are well established”.
“Regrettably we can no longer participate individually or as a group in a process that does not acknowledge current best practice in trauma care, our experience as surgeons, our concerns for existing and planned trauma care at CUH or our duty of care to non-trauma patients,” the surgeons wrote.
Asked about the issues raised in the letter, a spokesman for CUH said the hospital was designated as a major trauma centre as part of a multiyear, multiphase programme. “CUH has been funded for phase one of this multiphase programme. Patients attending CUH continue to receive all appropriate surgical care as their condition requires,” the spokesman said. “CUH management continually engage with colleagues on any and all matters of concern.”
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