Two children due to undergo heart surgery at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, earlier this week had to be sent home after their operations were deferred.
The hospital last night said it deeply regretted what happened. It said the children's "elective" or less-urgent operations were deferred "to accommodate two patients requiring emergency intensive care treatment".
It had made every effort to free up more intensive care beds and this involved transferring one child to another hospital, it added.
Not all of the hospital's intensive care (ICU) beds are available for use as there have been difficulties recruiting sufficient specialist nurses to staff them. Five nurses are required to staff every ICU bed around the clock.
A shortage of intensive care nurses at the hospital 14 months ago was also blamed for surgery on two-year-old Limerick girl Róisín Ruddle being cancelled.
She was due to have surgery to correct a congenital heart condition on June 30th last year but the operation was postponed. The child was sent back to her home at Kilmacow near Adare and her family was told the operation would be rescheduled. However, she died early the next morning.
Crumlin hospital, in a statement yesterday, said emergency surgery was never cancelled. If elective surgery was deferred, an alternative appointment was usually given to families within two weeks. It stressed there was a worldwide shortage of ICU nurses. It had made enormous efforts to recruit and had travelled to the Middle East, Asia, Britain and Poland, but still had 17 vacancies.
The New Crumlin Hospital Group, a parents organisation campaigning for better facilities at the hospital, said last night it was disappointed that children and parents still had to go through the trauma of having major surgery cancelled. Group spokesman Mr Karl Anderson said: "It beggars belief that a crisis of the scale of that of Crumlin does not yet feature on the new Minister for Health's stated list of priorities."