A Hospital Fit for ‘Walking Wounded’

ACCIDENT emergency and general services at Our Lady’s Hospital in Navan should be limited to the ‘walking wounded’ because the infrastructure is inadequate, a leaked report revealed yesterday.

A draft report for the Health Service Executive (HSE) has recommended that only minor injury cases should be treated in the hospital while surgery should be reduced because of ‘minimum infrastructure’.

But the HSE has said that existing services would be maintained at Our Lady’s Hospital until they are replaced with more appropriate services.

The unpublished report, which was leaked to RT yesterday said there are major problems at AE and in other areas of the hospital.

The report’s authors, the UK-based Capita Advisory Services, found that the hospital ‘does not have sufficient infrastructure to care safely for major emergencies’.

It said that services there should be reduced to minor injury cases, which are also known to medics as ‘the walking wounded’.

The draft report said there were problems with training junior doctors and maintaining training standards.

In the surgery department, it discovered that there was an ‘absence of minimum infrastructure,’ which means the service could not meet the standards required.

It also said that major emergency and major general surgical cases should not be treated in Our Lady’s but instead referred to a larger hospital.

The authors of the report also found other areas of concern after viewing patient files delays in operations due to staff availability, and lack of supervision of junior doctors.

Donal Duffy, assistant general secretary of the Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association said he had warned the Government two weeks ago about the situation in Navan.

‘There could be adverse incidents arising in Navan from the shortfall,’ he said.

‘Though the surgeons there are doing a first class job and touch wood nothing has happened so far.’ He said this was the second report that had highlighted a ‘serious deficiency’ in the infrastructure at Navan.

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