The Minister for Health says he will not allow a new report criticising standards at the Midlands Regional Hospital in Portlaoise to be "another missed opportunity".
Leo Varadkar says he accepts all of the findings and the recommendations of the damning HIQA report. "More than a decade of missed opportunities" is how Mr Varadkar described his standout impression of the report.
The report outlines a string of failures by hospital management in improving conditions - as well as cases where bereaved mothers were presented with their childrens' remains in tin boxes.
Minister Varadkar says he can't allow the report to be ignored - and it's now time to fix the issues once and for all, with the focus now needing to be "on changing some of the culture in our health service which is not patient centred, and implementing all of these recommendations as quickly as possible."
The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) says it cannot guarantee that services at the Midland Regional Hospital in Portlaoise are safe.
A report has found significant deficiencies and concerns over services at the hospital. It says the Health Service Executive (HSE) failed to take appropriate action deal with a litany of issues in the hospital.
The report was ordered following an exposé on the deaths of five babies at the maternity hospital.
In February, the HSE threatened an injunction against a draft report, saying it was unfair to senior HSE staff.
The 200-page document has already been approved by the board of HIQA and has been sent to the health minister.
It has also found that until July 2014 last year, the 24-hour emergency department at the hospital only had a consultant on site for six hours, four days a week.
Commenting on the report, HIQA's chief executive Phelim Quinn said: "This investigation was initiated as a result of the negative experiences of a number of patients and their families in receipt of services in Portlaoise Hospital...This care fell well below the standard expected in a modern acute hospital. We would particularly like to pay tribute to the patients and families who made contact with the authority to outline their experience of care within Portlaoise Hospital."
"Our findings point to failures, over a number of years by the HSE at a national, regional and local level to decisively address numerous clinical governance and management issues. This impacted upon the quality and safety of services provided at Portlaoise Hospital."
Margaret Murphy from HIQA says there were serious problems with the way parents were informed about the death of their children.
In response, the HSE says the HIQA report was carried out in October last year, and improvements have been made at Portlaoise Hospital since that time.
The Dublin Midlands Hospital Group says there are 16 new midwives working in the hospital - and a clinical director from the Coombe Hospital in Dublin has been working in the hospital for the past four weeks.
Other changes include streamlining emergency paediatric services and better training around foetal monitoring.
Eight recommendations made
HIQA has made eight recommendations which it says must be implemented to ensure "that risks and deficiencies identified are addressed at both local and national level to ensure the delivery of safe and consistent patient care."
Among the recommendations are the creation of an independent patient advocacy service to ensure that patients' reported experiences are recorded, listened to and learned from.
The investigation said that the hospital viewed itself as operating as a model-3 hospital - one which provides the full range of acute services to patients presenting with all injuries and illnesses.
But the HIQA report said services at the hospital were neither governed, resourced or equipped to provide this level of care.
It says the HSE "failed to take decisive action on defining the role of Portlaoise Hospital and its model of care in the context of the findings of previous investigations".
This was despite the fact that the HSE had information that indicated that its own clinical care programmes had expressed concerns about the quality and safety of acute and general medical services, paediatrics and surgery.
The investigation found that Portlaoise Hospital continues to provide undifferentiated surgical services where there are low numbers of complex surgical cases, despite the fact that two previous HIQA reports had identified clinical risks in these types of services.
