A young woman with cystic fibrosis left her hospital bed yesterday to make a personal appeal to Minister for Health Mary Harney to do something to improve treatment facilities for patients such as herself.
Denise Saul (24), from Crumlin, Dublin, confronted the Minister about poor facilities for cystic fibrosis patients as Ms Harney arrived at St Vincent's University Hospital, Dublin, to officially open a new €60 million clinical services building.
Dressed in her pyjamas and attached to a drip, Ms Saul stepped outside the hospital's main entrance to outline to Ms Harney and to the media the problems which exist at the national cystic fibrosis treatment centre at St Vincent's.
These problems were also outlined in stark terms in a report published last year.
The Pollock report said that the lack of segregation and isolation facilities for cystic fibrosis patients at St Vincent's was "dangerous" and that the hospital was at risk of being sued if patients picked up infections from each other. Ms Saul, who is being assessed for a lung transplant, said that cystic fibrosis patients, who pick up infections easily, were "scattered all over the place" in St Vincent's.
She said she had been a patient in the hospital for the past seven weeks and had been in a room where she was exposed to a diarrhoea infection.
"Only when my mom kind of got very annoyed about it was I moved . . . so I've been put at risk of a lot of infection."
Ms Saul added: "I just think the services that we have are appalling . . . we have been promised a cystic fibrosis unit here for over a good 12 years. We haven't got one. We are scattered all over the hospital . . . Something needs to be done about it and it needs to be done soon."
Ms Harney told reporters afterwards that she had met Ms Saul on many occasions before and she had asked the Health Service Executive (HSE) to prioritise the upgrading of facilities for cystic fibrosis sufferers.
"We have made resources available to this hospital. This is the national centre for cystic fibrosis and obviously, with the reconfiguration and the developments in the hospital, it is a priority for the HSE, and I've asked them to treat it as a priority this year," she said.
Meanwhile, the new clinical services building at St Vincent's, which was opened by Ms Harney, includes a new A&E department which has been in use for a number of months and which will cater for over 40,000 attendances a year.
A number of patients were on trolleys in the new A&E unit when Ms Harney visited it. These included three people who had been on trolleys overnight.
"Of course, that's unacceptable, but the health reform is all about changing that, and that's why there is a huge focus now on dealing with A&E. I did say some months ago that the HSE should treat it as an emergency, and they are," the Minister said.