OUR LADY’S Children’s Hospital, Crumlin has launched a €9 million fundraising appeal to revamp its facilities. But with a National Paediatric Hospital on the cards, can such investment be justified?
For Alister Kelly from Loughrea in Co Galway, the answer is yes. Born on a Sunday in January, three days later he underwent heart surgery in Crumlin. Of his 10-week life, he and his parents have spent seven of them here.
“He’s a little fighter alright,” says his father, John, from his bedside. “Between myself and my wife, Kierra, there is always one of us here. We’d be here until 1 or 2am and we’d be back again at 6am.”
“Here” is a room in St Theresa’s Ward in Crumlin’s cardiac unit, so cramped that neither resuscitation equipment nor Alistair’s family can fit.
“If one or two consultants come in and the nurse has to fix a monitor or something, they just don’t fit . . . there have been times when there is a queue outside the door.”
Alister’s older brothers must wait outside too. “When they come up, it’s just a joke. They are on stools outside. The family can’t come up because there is just no room.”
While full of praise for the staff – in a hospital whose outcomes are as good as any in Europe – with his tiny baby needing everything going for him, John is fearful that the cramped conditions are compromising Alister’s care.
The dripping tap to one side of Alister’s bed head and the bin on the other are causes for concern the Kellys just don’t need.
“When a doctor comes in, they come straight to the sink here to wash their hands. It’s often the case that water is just splashing across Alister’s cot,” he says.
The door handle is falling off too.
“What happens some day if somebody gets locked in? Are they going to kick the door down if he goes into cardiac arrest?”
Leaning back in this chair in frustration, the automatic hand towel dispenser above John’s head is triggered and spits out a ream of paper.
For the Kellys, the bickering over the National Paediatric Hospital is noise. Alister needs better facilities now.
Clinical nurse manager Paula McGrath says the cardiac facility built decades ago cannot accommodate modern treatment.
“We can’t physically fit our resuss trolley into our rooms,” she says. “If a child has an arrest, we need to keep the trolley outside the door and work from there. It’s not ideal at all.”
With the ward built in the day when parents dropped their child to the hospital and got a phone call to pick them up, the rooms aren’t designed for mum and dad either.
While rooms can just about accommodate a chair-bed, the conditions are particularly hard on post-delivery mums. On the 19-bed ward, parents share just one toilet and one shower.
“If you’ve had a child, you want your privacy,” says McGrath. “You have physical things happening to your body afterwards and you are sharing a toilet with other parents, male and female.”
And with each room partitioned by windows, privacy for breastfeeding or to hear tough news is sorely lacking.
“We’re here in this fishbowl,” says John Kelly. “Two feet away, you’ve got somebody else . . . there have been times when doctors come in talking to you and it’s been very upsetting news and you’ve got the people sitting right next door to you and they are trying not to look in at you and they are trying their best not to be listening . . . I even find myself, I can hear what’s going on next door, whether I want to or not.”
In nearby St John’s, the cancer ward, conditions are just as bad.
Fifteen-year-old Donal Walsh from Tralee is dealing with bone cancer with bravery and humour.
He shares a small room with his mum who wheels in a camp bed at night. Another patient and parent due that evening will make it four.
“Sharing a room is hard,” the teenager admits. “You could end up sharing with a baby who’s crying all night. There could be two machines going off. When you’re sick, sleep is the one thing you need.”
His mother Elma agrees it’s not easy.
“You get into your pyjamas, pull out your camp bed and try to get some sleep, but you don’t sleep really.
“Every turn you make, you make noise and then he wakes and wants to go to the loo. He has to pee in a jar because there is no bathroom and then I take it out to the sluice room, so you are up all night.”
She says by the time they get home after five days of chemotherapy, “We’re like cats.
“You are facing a drive back to Tralee and you’re wrecked heading back that road.”
Consultant paediatric haematologist Dr Aengus O’Marcaigh says for the 140 children in Ireland with malignancies who are treated in St John’s ward, there is a lack of dignity for both them and their parents.
He says the shared rooms without ensuite bathrooms are particularly tough on teens.
“It’s a time when they are supposed to be becoming independent of their parents, then all of a sudden with diagnosis, they become so dependent . . . the lack of privacy around toileting here is kind of the last straw.”
But more worrying again is infection control.
“The single most effective way of preventing cross-contamination from one patient to another is the physical space between them, and their own toilets,” he says.
“That we have to carry a highly infectious bed pan the length of the hallway in a ward full of children . . . it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
“We’ve got the medical expertise and the nursing staff are second to none but it’s purely the infrastructure that lets us down, and it lets us down badly,” he says.
Crumlin needs to raise €5 million to build its new cardiac unit and €4 million to improve its cancer ward because it says sick children are quite simply out of time.
“These children need treatment now,” says Dr O’Marcaigh.
“We’re going to have a huge number of children through here before the new hospital is built. The money will not be put to waste.”
To donate visit 1890 507 508 or visit cmrf.org
