The Minister for Health, Ms Mary Harney, has pledged to recruit more paediatric nurses following a report into the death of Róisín Ruddle which blamed a shortage in staff in the State's main children's hospital.
Two-year-old Róisín, who was from Limerick, died on July 1st, 2003 - the day after her operation at Our Lady's Hospital, Crumlin was postponed because there was no staffed intensive-care bed available.
The report, published today, found Róisín would have had a greater chance of survival had the surgery gone ahead and criticised management at the hospital for failing to tackle its shortage of paediatric intensive care nurses.
The report also said the Department of Health was aware of the problem for several years.
Speaking in the Dáil, Ms Harney said her thoughts were with the parents of Róisín but that deficiencies in the system must be rectified to prevent any reoccurrence.
She said the hospital has already made corrective action recommended by the report, which was commissioned by her predecessor Mr Micheál Martin.
Ms Harney said a new administrator at the hospital had been hired to recruit nurses, some from overseas.
But she added: "It is a fact that we have more nurses in Ireland than in any other country, substantially more than in the UK, but we do have particular shortages in intensive care and paediatrics.
"We have to make sure that those gaps are filled. We've got to make sure that the intensive care units are staffed at all times to be able to deal with patients that require services," she said.
The expert panel which investigated the case said changes to nursing education in the mid 1990s had led to it taking seven years to qualify as a paediatric intensive care nurse.
They concluded that with the changes in nursing education the shortages were predictable.
Ms Harney said one of the difficulties has been filling the existing training places for children's nurses.
She said that one of its recommendations in the report, the introduction of a direct entry undergraduate programme for combined children's and general nursing lasting four and half years, must be implemented.
"We also need to reduce the length of the existing post-registration programme for qualification as a children's nurse. These measures will reduce the time taken to qualify as a children's nurse and should increase the numbers coming through the system," she said.
Earlier Mr Martin said lessons needed to be learned from the report and admitted there were still not enough intensive care paediatric nurses.
Mr Martin - who is now the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment - said that during his time in the Department of Health he had made Crumlin Hospital a priority.
"I did everything I possibly could at the time in terms of increasing the numbers of nurse training places, in terms of additional resources. . . . But that is no consolation to the family and it is not acceptable that the child should die in these circumstances," Mr Martin said.
"For that I obviously would have great regret for what happened and so do all of us."
Labour Party spokeswoman on health Ms Liz McManus called on the Government to take immediate action in the wake of the findings.
"This report is unambiguous in stating that Róisín Ruddle's death was not down to one isolated event, but occurred as a consequence of chronic nursing shortages that have afflicted the Irish health service for many years," she said.
"This issue has been raised repeatedly over the last number of years by nursing organisations and politicians of all parties, yet the Government has never sought to address the issue properly."
