The father of Maedhbh McGivern has said his family has its own “back-up plan” in the event that his daughter receives another call for a liver transplant and is failed by State agencies.
Joe McGivern from Co Leitrim said the events of the night had been dealt with “very extensively and outlined extremely well by the Hiqa team” and he said what happened had not been done “with malice”.
The 14-year-old girl lost an opportunity for a liver transplant at King’s College Hospital in London on July 2nd after the authorities failed to organise a flight until it was too late. An inquiry into the events was published today.
Mr McGivern said the recommendations would not mean anything “unless they are implemented by the agencies involved and overseen by the Department of Health and we certainly hope that will happen”.
Speaking on RTÉ's News at One, Mr McGivern said the family's initial reaction to the report was one of "shock".
They had not believed what happened on the night could have been more shocking, he said.
The report had revealed that there was “no single agency or person that had overall accountability for the transportation of transplant recipients or for coordinating it”, Mr McGivern noted. “The one sentence that continues to pop out at me was that the system was ‘not designed to be reliable’.
“This is the stuff of horror shows. Nobody was accountable for the overall logistical decisions that were made and there was a lot of bad decisions made on the night.”
But the details also showed that seventy six inter-agency phone calls had been made.
“They scrambled, they tried hard. There was desperate measures made.”
Mr McGivern noted the report also outlined 21 “critical factors” where there had been a failure in the service and in the communications processes, and what he termed “the myriad of assumptions and decisions" that were made on the night.
“I suppose the most important thing is that what happened wasn’t done wasn’t done with malice or intent.
“Nobody intentionally blocked us from getting to England. It was just a complete and utter failure of the service to provide a system to safely transport patients," he said. "And the stresses involved for families alone was huge. Not even to take into account what happened to us on that particular night.”
Mr McGivern said his daughter’s condition remained unchanged.
“Her liver is failing. She’s in progressive liver failure, which is the way these things happen.
“I suppose the most important thing that we have to remember is that she is still on the high priority list in King’s College in London.
“We are going into our second year now on the waiting list. It’s a long time. And I think she holds the honourable title of being the longest child ever on the liver transplant waiting list in Ireland.”
Mr McGivern said the family would continue to “hope and pray” Maedhbh would receive another liver. They had a “stand-by” plan in case such a call came.
Asked if he believed a similar situation could happen again, he said: “It’s hard to think that it couldn’t.
“You’d like to hope that there will be a system put in place that will rectify this, not just for us but for everybody else that’s in the same predicament that we’re in.
“But there’s always that little bit of doubt in the back of your mind. And we do have a back-up plan of our own, just in case it ever did happen that the agencies that are put in place are not able to carry out that function in that period of time for us.”