Madam, - There is good news from the Central Statistics Office. We had 64,000 babies last year, with lots more on the way. The Government must be delighted with this further evidence of the health of the economy. If it is, it might express its pleasure by investing in services for the people making the babies.
The maternity services in this country are not good enough. The hospitals are overcrowded and understaffed and there is little equity in the two-tier system as it stands.
Four of the country's five largest maternity hospitals (three in Dublin and one in Limerick), which between them will deliver some 28,000 babies this year (more than 40 per cent of total births), are on sites remote from general hospitals. They do not have immediate access to the intensive care and diagnostic facilities required by some critically ill mothers. All of these hospitals occupy very valuable sites, the sale of which would meet much of the cost of relocating them.
Bed occupancy rates are around 100 per cent; it is impossible to maintain and clean properly wards that are constantly full. Hospital-acquired infections are inevitable. Typically, unless they have private insurance, mothers and their newborn babies are accommodated in wards of five beds and five cots, with only a single toilet and shower, and very little privacy.
Access to senior medical personnel is dismal. Ireland has about 100 obstetricians - by a long way the worst ratio in the developed world (just over two per 100,000 population). By comparison, Switzerland, which has a larger population but a similar number of births, has about 1,000 obstetricians.
Many Irish patients seek private care, not because they can easily afford it, but because they are so fearful of services for public patients. It might be reasonable for patients to pay extra for a better standard of accommodation or personal attention, but it is certainly not reasonable that they should have to pay because they fear that the service provided by the State is so woeful.
Crucially, the model of care available to private patients must result in better outcomes. Doubling the number of consultants would go a long way towards making a similar model of care available to all.
The birth rate will continue to rise for the next several years, but no worthwhile provisions have been made.
Our labour wards and ultrasound departments can barely cope with the current activity. The dire situation in some of our neonatal intensive care units is disgraceful.
Ireland is reputedly among the wealthiest nations on earth. Is it impossible for us to provide a decent service for women having babies? - Yours, etc,
Dr GERRY BURKE,
Consultant Obstetrician,
Steamboat Quay,
Limerick.