A woman from Monaghan who died before she could get to hospital in Dundalk might be alive if her local hospital was open for ambulance calls, according to her local TD.
"This is the type of tragedy I warned about when basic services were removed from Monaghan hospital," said newly elected TD Mr Paudge Connolly.
Her distraught husband, Mr Robin Knox, said, "it would have saved half an hour travelling if my wife could have gone to Monaghan hospital". He said she had no signs of ill health and "was in the best of form", before she became ill on Wednesday morning.
At 9 a.m. on Wednesday his wife, Christina, began vomiting and felt so unwell that Mr Knox rang their local doctor half an hour later. He was not available and the on-call doctor told him to immediately call an ambulance. The ambulance arrived promptly and began its 45-minute journey to the Louth County Hospital in Dundalk.
"Instead of going to Monaghan it went to Dundalk. She was on oxygen when we left here and they said her pulse stopped near the hospital in Dundalk. They tried hard to revive her but it was to no avail," Mr Knox said.
A post-mortem was being carried out on Mrs Knox last night but it is believed she died from a heart attack. "She wasn't in bad health but her lips turned blue in the ambulance," her husband added.
The couple married only 18 months ago and Mrs Knox worked helping her husband on their farm. They did not have children.
His wife's death "came out of the blue", he said, and last night he was finalising funeral arrangements as family and friends comforted him.
The North Eastern Health Board was criticised by Mr Connolly, who said, "The board was warned about just this sort of thing. Monaghan hospital was six minutes from her and the ambulance crews have been instructed to bring patients anywhere but Monaghan."
Its understood that Mrs Knox suffered her heart attack approximately 40 minutes after the ambulance left her home in Clontibret and if she had been admitted to Monaghan Hospital she could have been in the care of a doctor who could have prescribed vital medication that might have saved her.
The health board took the hospital "off-call" on July 2nd because it did not have any junior hospital doctors in anaesthesia.
In a statement the board said the College of Anaesthetists was no longer prepared to recognise the hospital as suitable for training purposes.