‘I can’t forgive the HSE, I can’t forgive Ireland, for what it did to my father’

A hospital campaigner has claimed the reconfiguration of casualty services including the removal of 24-hour casualty cover from Ennis and Nenagh Hospitals has “failed dismally”.

Addressing the hospital rally in Ennis on Saturday, Conor Reidy stressed people in the Mid-West need to protest on the streets for the upgrading of Ennis and Nenagh Hospitals as people could no longer be the government’s “guinea pigs” in their “failed experiment”.

After outlining stories about his father Johnny Reidy’s colourful life, Mr Reidy claimed he was a “victim of the HSE” in his last months as an 89 year-old in 2018.

The Nenagh Needs Its A&E Campaign representative recalled his father who was Type Two diabetic medical card patient was was often left waiting at the end of the queue at the Eye Clinic at UHL.

When Mr Reidy queried a five-hour wait for his father one day, he was told by a clinic nurse that a senior medical person wanted the private patients done first.

On July 3, 2018, Johnny Reidy suffered a stroke in St Conlon’s Community Nursing Home in Nenagh.

He was taken by ambulance to the Emergency Department at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) where he began the first of two nights on a trolley in the horrendous conditions of trolleys lined up all over the ED.

“You’ve seen the photographs. Narrow corridors. Trolleys toe-to-toe. No standing space for a loved-one without them being in the way of staff and other loved-ones passing up and down.

“Forget the toilet. Forget any pain or discomfort you might be experiencing. This was maximum fear. Maximum stress.

“Think about the terror of being 89-years-old, with all your various medical problems, and finding yourself trapped in this monstrous dystopian nightmare.

“As we all know, once you get past the Emergency Department, UHL is actually a decent hospital delivering fairly high-class care.

Following transfer to Nenagh Hospital for step-down care on August 3, 2018, Mr Reidy claimed his father was “discharged with pneumonia” to join his mother in St Conlon’s “out-of-the blue” on August 27, arriving at 2pm.

“From the moment the nursing home staff settled him in bed, it was clear something wasn’t right. He was suffering from exacerbations. Choking in the bed. Struggling to breathe.

“My heart breaks as I remember him calling for God to take him there and then. He could bear it no longer. By 5pm his GP was at his bedside. Johnny was discharged from Nenagh Hospital with pneumonia.”

Mr Reidy claimed his family and the nursing home wanted to get him back a short distance to Nenagh Hospital but were refused point blank as HSE protocol dictated that he must go to UHL by ambulance.

As the ambulance paramedics struggled to get him into a fit state to travel, one of the nursing home nurses was uncertain he would make the journey.

“I next saw him in a resuscitation room in UHL ED later that night. He was unconscious, apart from a few noises from the chest. When we were alone, I had what I thought was my final conversation with him. I told him I loved him. I told him what he meant to me.

“Miraculously, he made it through the night and was out on a trolley in what I called the zoo section of the emergency department by the next morning.

“There he stayed for another 24 hours. Two weeks from that day, he would turn 90 years old.”

After another week in a ward in UHL, Johnny returned to Nenagh Hospital for the final time before he died on September 12, 2018.

“I don’t have the capacity to forgive what the HSE did to my wonderful, beautiful father in his final months. He didn’t deserve what this country did to him in his final months. I can’t forgive the HSE. I can’t forgive Ireland.”