Sooner or later a mother will be lost, according to the sole obstetrician at Monaghan General Hospital. Reacting to the death of Bronagh Livingstone just hours after her mother, Denise, had been turned away from Monaghan Hospital, Mr Alphonsus Kennedy said such a scenario was inevitable.
Mr Kennedy is on full pay at Monaghan General Hospital as a consultant obstetrician-gynaecologist, although he has not been permitted to practise since maternity services were suspended there on March 1st, 2001.
Standing amid disused incubators and neo-natal resuscitation equipment in the hospital's now closed maternity unit, just upstairs from where Denise Livingstone had tried to get medical help for her unborn baby, he says that had there been the full maternity services of two years ago at the hospital, Ms Livingstone would have been admitted and assessed.
"We would have assessed whether she was going to give birth there and then, and if she was, we would have admitted her before transferring the baby in a transportation incubator to the premature baby unit in Cavan.
"If she was not about to give birth, she would have been transferred in an ambulance with a midwife, junior doctor and the necessary emergency equipment. Adequate equipment is vital. All the damage is done in the first hour of life."
All 23 maternity beds at Monaghan Hospital were closed "temporarily", according to the Northeastern Health Board, last year.
The maternity ward is now used as a storage area and waiting area for the ante-natal clinic, which is run one day a week on a 9-to-5 basis.
Mr Kennedy said he had hoped to reopen maternity services, but had all but given up on this and had applied for retirement.
He currently has to turn up at the hospital every day, but has little more to do than "open post and make some calls". His consulting room no longer has any obstetric equipment.
Mr Kennedy said he could have done nothing for Ms Livingstone on Wednesday morning as the health board had not allowed him to renew his malpractice insurance, which ran out in July. This was despite assurances given last year that the closure of his unit was a "temporary" measure.
The board says it plans to open a midwife-led maternity unit at Monaghan in the future, but has no timetable for that.
