Niamh Smyth (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to raise this very important issue regarding the 20-week anomaly scan at Cavan General Hospital. I have submitted numerous parliamentary questions in the past eight months and I have been getting mixed messages from the Health Service Executive, HSE, on this issue. I was first led to believe that it had been actively worked on for Cavan General Hospital and that it was the aim of the HSE to provide this essential scan to pregnant women in Cavan, Monaghan and across the region. We then heard that the equipment was in place in the hospital but that the management is unable to fill the vacancies with the required expertise. I have now been informed that scans will be provided for within the RCSI hospital group because staffing cannot be secured to have them carried out at Cavan General Hospital. That is cold comfort to expectant mothers in Cavan and Monaghan.

The hiring of professionals across all Departments within the HSE appears to be a recurring problem. One must ask why that is the case. Is it just an excuse to get out of the original commitments to provide this anomaly scan in Cavan General Hospital and force pregnant women to travel up to two hours away to have the scan they need? Why should women in Cavan and Monaghan, and across the general area, not have this scan made available to them? I have to say they are being treated differently and discriminated against, and we are back to the same old story of only looking after those living in the big cities.

Unfortunately, too many harrowing cases have been reported in recent years regarding these scans. We had one only this week in County Cork. I do not know the reason the HSE is not listening to the women who have been crying and concerned about this issue. Why will it not accept and implement the recommendations of previous cases taken against the HSE? When something goes wrong during pregnancy or, even worse, when there is a fatality, it has a devastating impact on the families involved and on the staff in hospitals. To hear that this anomaly scan, if available, could prevent and change the outcome in some way adds further insult to injury. To the families that have been bereaved, it is incomprehensible.

Having a scan available to expectant mothers at any other site apart from Cavan General Hospital is not good enough. It is not enough to cherry-pick certain areas and only provide in the big cities. To further compound the families' grief, misinformation has been given to the media by the professionals leading the public, and me, to believe that the scan would be made available in the hospital. That is simply not true.

I requested a meeting with the Minister, Deputy Harris, regarding one particular family, the Whelans, who have suffered terribly. In requesting the meeting for the Whelan family, the Minister's answer, which I will paraphrase, was that it would be better for them to meet the HSE. That is not what the Whelan family want to hear. They want to meet with the Minister to express their concerns and to ensure that this is implemented in Cavan General Hospital.

When and why has the plan changed from providing the scan at the hospital to providing a regional maternal foetal medicine service with the RCSI group? Why does the HSE think this model would give greater recruitment success? Why has the HSE given up so easily on requiring the staff of the hospital to provide the scan, particularly when we believe all the equipment necessary for the scan is in the hospital?

Will the Minister of State outline what are the long-term plans of the Department and the HSE for the unit in Cavan General Hospital? It is a fabulous department which just requires this one scan, which has been recommended.

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