CampaignThe Department of Health is to be put under renewed pressure from the people of Galway and the West to fund a neurosurgery unit at University College Hospital Galway.
The offer of a €4 million laser knife - a tool at the cutting edge of brain surgery - from a top Irish American neurosurgeon in the US for such a unit has been met with "deafening silence" from the Irish Government, the Western Neurosurgery Campaign points out.
Mrs Pat O'Dwyer, wife of former President of New York City Council, the late Paul O'Dwyer, has warned that support for the project among the Irish American community in New York is flagging because of the failure of Health Minister, Mr Micheál Martin to accept their offer.
Pointing out that there was a neurosurgery unit in An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's backyard in Dublin and a second unit in Micheál Martin's backyard in Cork, Mrs O'Dwyer said there was no politician in the West of Ireland willing to fight for a unit there and they were all merely paying lip service to the campaign.
She pointed out that there was still no sign of the Comhairle na nOispideal review commissioned by the Minister into neurosurgical services in Ireland and said it was a scandal that the people of the West were bereft of a brain injury service.
At the recent IMO conference in Killarney, Mayo anaesthesist Dr Michael Thornton highlighted the fact that patients with brain injury in Ireland often died before they were seen by a specialist.
Consultant anaesthesist at UCHG, Dr Kevin Clarkson, said people now needed to put pressure on their local politicians to lobby Government in relation to the funding of a neurosurgery unit at UCHG.
Such a unit, he pointed out, would treat not just trauma patients, but a whole spectrum of brain diseases that required intervention including brain haemorrhages, tumours and shunts.
Dr Clarkson explained that the Gamma laser knife which Prof Patrick Kelly of the Neurosurgery Department at New York Medical Centre is willing to donate to a unit in Galway offered a non-invasive therapy for patients who were either currently not being treated or treated with surgery or less optimal radiation treatment.
"If we had this piece of equipment at UCHG, we would become the national centre for neurosurgery," he said.
Clinical nurse manager at the critical care unit at UCHG, Julie Silke, pointed out that a new state-of-the-art 27-bed critical care complex had recently been opened at the hospital, making it the largest unit of its kind in the country.
"Our vision is to regionalise and self contain care in all services and the big gap at the moment is in neurosurgery. We have the facilities and the staff here and a strong multi-disciplinary team. What we are advocating is very much in line with the health reforms," she explained.
Ms Silke said patients should be kept in the West instead of being made to wait on lengthy lists for tumour surgery in the capital.
"There is a neurosurgical capacity problem throughout this country no matter where you live, even in Dublin or Cork. People are just not getting access to the services they need and the solution is that we have to have more capacity.
"We can do this by expanding the existing units at Beaumont or Cork or starting a new unit in Galway which is what we are arguing for," Ms Silke added.
The Western Health Board region alone has a catchment area of 380,000, but as a supraregional centre, UCHG treats patients from Donegal down as far as Clare.
