24/7 Cath Lab Campaign

Just to add from their own bumpf about spending the HSE estimate their budget this year to be 26.5 Billion. For this to be held up for a decade for the cost of as you say a little over 600K is unconscionable

Now Jenni Ledwell can rest in peace

The 24 hour cathlab while a welcome and much needed addition to the region is fortunately a service that no longer has as much relevance as it did 10-20 years ago. The quality of people's health and modern cardiac services such as scheduled angiograms have improved so much that people are no longer requiring the need of emergency PPCI on the same level they did when all this started coming to light. People are being caught in the net through outpatient angio-procedures operating on from Monday to Friday.

The weekend and night time cath lab availability for the emergency intervention of STEMI's have become increasingly uncommon. I would hazard that less than 10-20 people a year require transfer to CUH for emergency STEMI intervention but thats just an educated guess. These people are usually self presentations to ED also. Out of hospital STEMI's are exceptionally rare now days compared to 20+ years ago.

Anyway, what I'm getting at here is while all the public and political attention has been drawn to the ridiculously long campaign for 24/7 cardiac care in UHW there is another service that has been completely forgotten about, one that kills magnitudes more on a monthly basis because there is no service in UHW for it.

Stroke services: The South East has no Thrombectomy services. So when somebody in the SE has a stroke that requires a procedure very similar to the PPCI procedure performed in the Cath lab, they require emergency transfer to CUH or Beaumont in Dublin. Even Strokes that do no meet thrombectomy criteria regularly require transfer to CUH neuro for management as the stroke unit in UHW is a single room with 5 beds in it.

The amount of people dying from strokes in the SE because they have no access to emergency neuro services is scandalous.

IMO there needs to be a massive campaign for this now that we have gotten our 24/7 cath lab.