The pressures placed on Dublin's maternity hospitals by non-national women has continued unabated despite last year's Supreme Court judgment. Eithne Donnellan, Health Correspondent, reports.
The court ruled that non-national parents of Irish-born children did not have an automatic right to residence in Ireland.
Yet at the Coombe Women's Hospital, the number of births to non-national women continued to rise in 2003. Some 7,848 babies were born at the hospital last year, the most on record since 1972. The percentage of these delivered to women whose country of origin was not Ireland was 22 per cent.
This represented an increase on 2002 figures. That year saw 7,507 births at the hospital, 20 per cent of which were to women whose country of origin was not Ireland.
At the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street the picture is similar. There 8,378 babies were delivered last year, of which 20.8 per cent were to non-national mothers.
This was an increase on the 2002 position when 8,162 children born at the hospital, 18.2 per cent of them to non-national mothers.
Figures were not available yesterday for the Rotunda in 2003. But in 2002 the hospital delivered 6,971 babies, up from 6,600 in 2001.
The master, writing in the hospital's latest annual report, said the number of immigrant women delivering at the hospital had been increasing by approximately 50 per cent a year for the last number of years. There were 1,922 non-national women delivered at the Rotunda in 2002, he said.
One of the concerns of the maternity hospitals, apart from the extra pressure on their resources, is the fact that many of these women were in advanced stages of pregnancy when they presented. Some presented for the first time when in labour.
An additional challenge for staff has been familiarising themselves with medical disorders and diseases in non-national women not normally found in the indigenous population.
The National Maternity Hospital confirmed yesterday that 239 patients arrived unbooked or within 10 days of delivery at Holles Street last year.
The master of the Coombe, Dr Seán Daly, said there were major and wide-ranging issues challenging the resources of Dublin's maternity hospitals which needed to be addressed, one of which was the increasing immigrant population presenting.
"The case of women travelling to Ireland late in their pregnancies is unsafe and poses serious risk to their health and the health of their babies," he said.
"Year on year we are experiencing significant increases in overall birth numbers. There was a 5 per cent increase in deliveries in the Coombe last year and a 4 per cent increase this year to date."
One of the major issues is resources not matching the quantity of work being carried out at these hospitals. This has had to result in mothers having a shorter hospital stay after giving birth.