Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

We used to aspire to having a society and a health service where we look after people from the cradle to the grave, but I want to deal with the period before we get to the cradle and the crisis that exists in the maternity services in this State. Since 2001, the directors of the midwifery services and the CEOs of the three major maternity hospitals have spoken about having a scenario of too few obstetric staff, too few midwives and overstretched to the point of raising fundamental concerns about safety. Despite that, in response to the closure of the Mount Carmel Hospital last weekend, the Minister for Health states, without a shred of evidence, that the existing hospitals will absorb the 1,000 plus births that Mount Carmel used to deliver. How could this miracle possibly happen? It is true, as the Minister stated, that the birth rate has declined slightly, but we are nowhere near the levels that we were at in 2007 and 2008, when at that time the HSE commissioned a report into our maternity and gynaecological services in the greater Dublin area which declared a crisis. The report stated that the hospitals were understaffed and they needed an additional 20 obstetricians, 221 midwives, 20 neonatal nurses and 35 theatre staff across the three main maternity hospitals. Since then, the birth rate has increased by about 40% and the CEO of the Rotunda said at the end of 2012 that the figures given to staff those hospitals, at a full-time equivalent of 707.73 staff, were not sufficient. Yet last year, the hospital was given 679.42 full-time equivalent staff.

This crisis is replicated around the country. There are high sick levels, there is an embargo on recruitment and staff and midwives are leaving. The result of this is the type of analysis that we got in the report commissioned by HIQA in the services at University College Hospital Galway last year, where there was deemed to be a general lack of provision and fundamental care. The answer to this has been to cut funding further. Unless we have a radical overhaul of our maternity services, then further lives will be put at risk. The safest way, with the best results for women and their children, has been established as an investment in midwifery and midwife services, yet this Government has failed to replicate the pilot programmes that were carried out. If we were to invest in that, we would save money and have a better outcome for women and their children. Cutting budgets and failing to attend to that will not deliver.

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