Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House. I fully understand that the Minister is not available. I wish to raise the report on maternity services at Portlaoise. The report includes a recommendation that the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists made in its report on the future of maternity and gynaecological services in Ireland. The institute recommended, in December 2006, that clinical maternity networks should be established in Ireland. It also recommended that the maternity department at Portlaoise hospital be linked with the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital in Dublin. This recommendation to establish clinical maternity networks was not progressed at national level. Some eight years later, in 2014, and in light of the range of adverse incidents highlighted earlier in the report, the report of the chief medical officer repeated the recommendation.

My concern this morning relates to the Portlaoise report. The report recommends that each of 19 maternity units throughout the country should have a director of midwifery. My understanding is that eight of the 19 units still have not appointed such a director. Part of the problem, as I understand it, is that the criteria for those who qualify for the job have been set so high that we cannot attract suitable candidates, especially in respect of the smaller units.

I raised this matter at the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health four or five weeks ago. Some alterations have been made in the criteria. I still do not believe that we will be able to fill the eight vacant positions despite the new criteria. We seem to be going on the line that a candidate must be at clinical nurse manager 3 level for a number of years before she can go forward for this job. There are staff who have maternity experience but who may have been working in a managerial capacity in other areas within hospitals and dealing with patients on a daily basis. These people are now excluded from applying for the jobs to which I refer. I am suggesting that we must be practical, especially regarding the criteria we set out for the smaller units. A recommendation was made in 2006. I want to avoid a repeat of the situation whereby action had still not bee taken eight years after that recommendation was made. We found ourselves in an unmerciful mess in the context of trying to sort out a major difficulty with a hospital. I do not want another report to be put on a shelf or to have to come back to the Minister 12 months from now only to find out that the positions are still vacant. That is the context in which I am raising this issue.