THE ALLEGED cancellation of life-saving surgery for an 11-year-old girl at Crumlin children’s hospital has been described as “a disgrace” and “shameful” by Mary White TD, deputy leader of the Green Party.
Ms White, the family’s local TD, has met Minister for Health Mary Harney to discuss the case.
Emer Murphy, who lives in Graiguenamanagh, Co Kilkenny, claims that the hospital told her in April that her daughter Jamie (11), who suffers from spina bifida and scoliosis, needed life-saving surgery urgently. Ms Murphy said her child is “confined to a wheelchair and that her severely curved spine is compressing her heart, lungs and kidneys”.
The family was expecting the surgery to take place “any day now” and had prepared their daughter by telling her she would be going to hospital.
However, last Friday week, after a series of frantic telephone calls to the hospital, Ms Murphy was told that although Jamie is on a priority list for surgery and the surgeon is willing to operate there was no operating theatre available nor any bed available for the necessary post-operative treatment in the intensive care unit .
She said the hospital blamed “financial cutbacks” and she was told by the surgeon that he “had suffered a sleepless night because he was dreading telling us the news”.
Ms Murphy and her husband Peter say the hospital then offered a new appointment to the family later this summer to discuss “how to make Jamie comfortable for the time she has left”.
The distraught Murphy family, who have three other children, then demanded their daughter’s records and got in touch with the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London where they were immediately given an appointment with a consultant for next week.
They are now engaged in fundraising for the trip to England and also to raise further money for surgery which they fear could cost in the region of £50,000 (€59,000).
Jamie, who was born with spina bifida and has severe scoliosis, weighs 35lbs (16kg) and is confined to a wheelchair. However, she attends the local primary school.
Her aunt, Triona O’Brien, said the family had “always been happy with the treatment that Jamie has received over the past 11 years” at Crumlin hospital but that the little girl’s life was now in danger because of cutbacks in the health service.
She said that Jamie’s condition was deteriorating and that the surgery was urgently necessary because the child’s curved spine has “reduced her lung capacity to 29 per cent, is affecting her kidneys, causing pressure sores on her body and affecting her ability to eat”.
A spokeswoman for Crumlin children’s hospital said that while she could not discuss individual cases, “all emergency orthopaedic surgery is being carried out”.
Jamie Murphy’s predicament has led to a public outcry in Kilkenny and comes less than two years after the controversy surrounding the death of Susie Long, whose bowel cancer diagnosis was delayed while she waited seven months for a colonoscopy.
