A RETIRED consultant neurosurgeon has criticised the lack of a designated air ambulance service to transport trauma patients.
Christopher Pidgeon, a retired neurosurgeon at Beaumont Hospital, said: “A country like Ireland should have an air ambulance service, considering its geographically dispersed population”.
His comments followed questioning from Dublin city coroner Dr Brian Farrell as to why Beaumont Hospital, Ireland’s designated neurological hospital, had no facilities to allow helicopters transporting patients with serious head injuries to land.
Mr Pidgeon said the hospital had repeatedly applied for landing facilities for helicopters but was turned down each time. As a result, patients with severe head injuries were airlifted to Dublin airport before being brought by ambulance to Beaumont.
“Most road accidents with head injuries occur at night. We would need to have a helipad, which would allow night landings, and there would need to be expensive floodlighting and fencing to allow this,” he said, adding that space was also a problem at Beaumont.
He told the coroner a helipad couldn’t be put on the roof as the building would need to be constructed so as to survive the crash of a helicopter loaded with fuel.
Mr Pidgeon was speaking at the inquest into the death of former Honda Ireland managing director Peter Cullen at Beaumont Hospital on September 20th, 2009, following a serious head injury.
The 68-year-old from Shankill, Co Dublin, was gardening at his holiday home in Wicklow when he fell on loose stones and hit his head. His wife Joan told the inquest he seemed fine immediately after the fall but developed a headache an hour later and began to feel unwell.
He went upstairs to bed but his condition quickly deteriorated, he became incoherent and began to lose consciousness. Ms Cullen said she called 999 and waited an hour for an ambulance to arrive.
Upon arrival, paramedics felt it could worsen Mr Cullen’s condition if he was transported via ambulance as he had a head trauma and it was a long and bumpy road to the hospital. The family waited nearly another hour before a Coast Guard helicopter arrived. Mr Cullen was then airlifted to Tallaght hospital before being transferred by ambulance to Beaumont.
At 5am, some 12 hours after his fall, surgeons carried out surgery to remove a subdural haematoma. The operation was successful and Mr Cullen was transferred to the high-dependency unit. He suffered a cardiac arrest in the unit on September 17th, seven days after the fall, and died three days later.
A postmortem carried out by Dr Francesca Brett, a neuropathologist at Beaumont Hospital, gave the cause of death as cardiac failure. Mr Cullen had a history of significant heart disease.
Counsel for the family, Dr Simon Mills, said he was surprised by the lack of a designated air ambulance service in Ireland.
Recording a narrative verdict, Dr Farrell said he would write to the Minister for Health and HSE regarding the lack of an air ambulance service in Ireland and the absence of a helipad at Beaumont Hospital.
Speaking after the inquest, the deceased’s wife, Joan, said it was “almost unbelievable” Ireland had no air ambulance service and that there was no helipad at Beaumont.