John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests and extend sympathy to those who had tragedies visited on their families in Portlaoise. I will try to act in a fashion becoming of the Parliament but I must be harsh. All I can say is this room reeks of whitewash, and I am sorry this report does not address core issues. I mean no personal disrespect to anybody but people employed in the Department and HSE have grown up in a certain culture with a method of dealing with matters in a corporate fashion that colours the way in which they see the service and its customers.

We can go through some facts. As my colleague, Senator Burke, has pointed out, the number of births increased from 1,000 to somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500. The number of consultants, already fairly ludicrously low at three, stayed at three. This was a time when this region had an influx, for unusual demographic reasons related to the real estate market, of young couples occupying pseudo-dormitory commuter communities. There was a disproportionate number of young people coming in at a time in life when they would be starting a family. The national birth rate in these years went up by 17% but in Portlaoise it went up by 50%. To reiterate the point, the number of consultants - which was inadequate at three - stayed at three. When Dr. Holohan states his belief that staffing issues had nothing to do with this, I must ask him why the Department of Health and the HSE allowed this place to be overstaffed when there were only 1,000 births per year if three consultants was the appropriate number when there were 2,500 births per year.

Added to this are the non-consultant hospital doctors, or to call them what they are, trainees. As I stated before, if an engagement ring is dropped down a drain, one would not expect an apprentice plumber to fix it but we are quite happy to let precious children, our wives, husbands, spouses and parents to go to hospital every day and be treated by non-consultant hospital doctors.

The reason is that by fiat of successive Governments, the permanent government, the Department of Health and its more recent offspring, the HSE, there was a policy of having a ludicrously low level of career level posts in our country. Recently, applications were invited for specialist registrar positions in obstetrics. I will put my cards on the table. I do not believe those people should be regarded as anything other than trainees. I do not care how senior or qualified they are, they are trainees. However, even for this level of training, there were 13 applicants for the 16 jobs and only nine were considered to have met the minimum educational requirements to do it.

Portlaoise hospital was not even recognised for training, so why was it employing NCHDs? Why are trainees working in a hospital which is not recognised for training? From where did they come? Were these people the well-meaning, good people who are often trained in other countries and come to this country seeking experience and are then exploited by being put into jobs which are not recognised for training, to provide cheap labour for a system which will not employ the appropriate number of career level consultants? Were any of them part of the process of us recruiting in medically under-served countries to poach their doctors to come and work here? This is not an isolated matter. We have discussed it previously and I was less than impressed with the response that was given when I pointed this out following the tragedy that occurred in Galway 16 months ago. Galway is the region not just in Ireland but in the entire OECD that has the lowest number of consultant obstetricians per head of population, yet we are told it is entirely coincidental that these types of tragedy occur.

We have been whitewashed over the years with the reassurance that at least our perinatal mortality figures are good. My mind has been blown away by this report. Now we do not know what they are. We might have miserable perinatal mortality rates because the witness is telling us that nobody is recording them appropriately. I am not impressed by this and, with great respect to the undoubtedly genuine human sympathies of the people from the HSE and the Department of Health and their interactions with these poor families who suffered such tragic losses and, it would appear, were treated poorly, if they really wish to be sincere in their sympathy and not shed crocodile tears to mix with the whitewash, they will fix the problem.

I have another question. Were consultants involved in the two episodes of foreign bodies?