CUMH fights for own chief separate to CUH

Peter Boylan, chair of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said it was the case that pregnant women outside Dublin who cannot afford to privately pay for ultrasound scans are disadvantaged.

Responding to a question from Fine Gael’s Kate O’Connell who asked if access was “a class issue”, Dr Boylan said: “You are absolutely correct. The poor are disadvantaged across the board and don’t have access to the same sort of ultrasound services outside of Dublin.”

Dr Boylan and Prof Kenny were addressing a joint Oireachtas health committee which met yesterday to discuss the new National Maternity Strategy 2016-2026, on which, it was claimed, limited progress has been made.

Liam Woods, HSE national director of the acute hospitals division, named CUMH as one of six sites where anomaly scans were available. When Ind. Senator Alice Mary Higgins said less than half of women had access at the hospital, Mr Woods replied: “We can come back to you with precise current data if that is helpful.”

On the issue of governance, Prof Kenny, a consultant obstetrician/gynaecologist at CUMH, said when the hospital opened in 2007, her colleagues had successfully argued for a certain budget.

“If we had control over that budget, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” she said.

Currently, more than 4,200 women are on the outpatient list for gynaecology services at CUMH, potentially “incubating malignancies”.

Moreover, women unable to access a 20-week anomaly scan face the possibility of not finding out until after birth that their child had a major foetal anomaly. It also means staff are unable to plan appropriate care in the absence of an antenatal diagnosis, with poorer outcomes for babies.

Ms Kenny said women’s health was “always first to be cut” and it is “mainly down to governance”.

“Year after year, we [CUMH] lost money to the main campus [CUH],” she said. “It went to other clinical areas. Consequently, we are where we are with waiting lists that are worrying beyond belief. ”

She told the committee she was “agnostic as to whether it’s a master or a mistress” when it came to governance of CUMH, but that the hospital needed its own chief.

“If we had had that [separate governance] in the last 10 years, we would have no waiting lists and we would be the flagship hospital that we should be,” she said.

Dr Boylan said that the National Maternity Hospital had set up its own private anomaly scanning system for private patients “which allowed us free up other areas” thereby increasing capacity for public patients.

However, this kind of “entrepreneurial spirit” wasn’t tolerated when a maternity hospital came in under the governance of a general hospital, he said.

“You just can’t do that, you will get slapped down.”

The battle for independent governance of CUMH and a ringfenced budget has led to extremely poor relations between consultants and current management of CUH.

Last week, Health Minister Simon Harris announced the appointment of a clinical director of maternity services for the South/South West Hospital group.

However, the scope of this role and whether it means greater autonomy for CUMH has yet to be revealed.