Woman gives birth in Navan Hospital, which has no maternity unit

dbnavan

The following is taken from this weeks Meath Chronicle & Unison.ie

THE recent unscheduled arrival of a baby in the accident and emergency (A&E) department of Our Lady’s Hospital in Navan looks set to revive the row over the lack of maternity services in the county.

For young mother, Michelle Timmons from Fordstown, Athboy, it was a fortuitous decision to divert to the Navan hospital en route to her intended destination of Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda where her baby son, Tiarnan, was born shortly after she arrived.

The revelation of the birth in

A&E comes as a new row about staffing levels at the department in Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan, is placing a further cloud over the future of the service there.

While junior doctors at the hospital threatened to “work under protest from 1st January”, Navan-based Fine Gael TD, Damien English, a dedicated advocate of expanded services in the unit, called for the removal of “the black cloud” which has hung over A&E with services there being expanded, rather than cut. With Meath’s population rapidly heading towards the 200,000 mark, a maternity hospital and other services, such as A&E, must be provided in the county, he said.

As Michelle Timmons recounts, but for her and her husband Terry’s decision to make an unscheduled stop at Our Lady’s, the birth of Tiarnan could have been a far

less straightforward procedure then it turned out to be.

Michelle, who was six days overdue with the baby, had booked into the midwife-led service at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital and it was to Drogheda that she and Terry set off after her waters broke at around 6.30am on 25th November. Her mother in Athboy was to have looked after her other son, Jamie, but Michelle was getting contractions “very fast” as they left their house at 7.10am, so the four-year-old was dropped off with Terry’s brother in Fordstown. The advice of Michelle’s mother on the phone was that they should go straight to Our Lady’s in Navan.

On the Navan/Athboy road, the contractions had become very severe, so the couple phoned ahead to Navan. The casualty staff offered an ambulance but they continued on by car. “I never was as happy to see the gates of the hospital,” said Michelle this week.

Waiting for them outside A&E were at least four nurses, wheelchair at the ready. Once in A&E, she was examined by a doctor while two experienced midwifery nurses, including Anne McKenna, and other nurses prepared to help with the delivery.

“They were coming off shifts but they stayed on,” said Michelle. When the eight pound boy gave his first cry, she had trouble getting to hold the child, so delighted were the A&E staff with him.

Although the unit in Navan is not equipped for delivering babies, the nearest unit being in Drogheda, within five minutes of arrival, it was like a delivery room and Michelle’s pain was relieved with the provision of gas and oxygen.

“We arrived at 7.40am and the baby was born at 8.10am,” recalled Michelle. It was just about an hour since the start of the contractions at around 7.10am. “I dread to think what would have happened if we had gone ahead to the Lourdes,” she added, speculating that they would not have got further than Slane.

She added that, while the trip from Fordstown to Drogheda formerly took about 40 minutes, it had increased to an hour at least, due to traffic congestion and the series of traffic lights in Drogheda.

Michelle fully supports the calls of Deputy English for a maternity unit in Navan. She is a fan of the midwife-led type of service which is provided in Drogheda, which includes post-delivery home visits. Her admiration and gratitude to the Navan hospital staff who helped her are immense, she added.

Meanwhile, Deputy English also paid tribute to the staff in Navan, who, he stated, all do a great job, often in adverse circumstances. The A&E section is based in a 30 years-old prefab at the hospital.

The dispute at A&E is believed to stem from the decision that interns would not work there from the start of the New Year. The Health Service Executive plan to introduce more registrar and senior hospital doctor staff at Our Lady’s has brought opposition from the Irish Medical Organisation. The IMO position is that services would have to be cut unless more junior doctors were taken on.

The large group campaigning to save the Navan hospital, which has lost such services as paediatric care and orthopaedic emergency surgery, fear that the Navan hospital could become an increasingly unattractive place for Irish doctors trying to improve their careers through gaining experience.

A spokesperson for the IMO, which represents the doctors, said the board and

staff were not consulted about the changes in relation to the interns and warned that the new staffing arrangement risked compromising patient care.

Is it not time to not only save Navan Hospitial but upgrade it to cater for maternity and other lacking facilities, closure would only increase waiting lists even further, Navan is one of the fast growing towns in ireland and there is talk of it losing its hospital. What are this government at!!!

amk00

Totally Agree!:)

jdivision

If we want excellence we have to centralise services. The fact we haven't because of political pressure is one of the reasons we're in a mess. The health service is a black hole.

BrianD

This is a non story.

It still doesn't take away from the fact that we need to close these hospitals. They are costing the tax payers a fortune and will never provide the facilities that are required.

Even with a state of the art super hospital present in Navan, this woman could have ended up having the baby in a cow shed on the side of the road. Not forgetting that millions of people everyday are not born in a hospital.

It's a 27km drive from Navan to Drogheda on a N route that in the perfect world takes a 30 min drive. That is not an reasonable distance to travel. In Dublin, it can take you twice as long as that to go from the suburbs through traffic to the any of the various maternity hospitals. The distance from Athboy to Drogheda is 45km.

Navan should have a hospital but not a full service one. At the end of the day even with the slimmed down resources the hospital was able to cope with the birth.

JustinDee

Whats the issue with the article?
Is it untrue? If the issue is the hospital in the story itself then its in the wrong forum surely?

Vorsprung

Non story.

You can't have maternity services at every hospital. If a woman rocks up to an Emergency Dept and is about to give birth, it's better that it's done at a facility equipped with the space and facilities for resuscitation should they be needed, even if there are no obstetric facilities, as opposed to driving past that facility. Mum and baby can then be transported on when things have settled down.