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A new year strategy to “stabilise” the Daisy Hill Hospital maternity unit has been presented to elected reps at a special Council meeting on Monday night, 25 November.
The Southern Trust outlined its emergency plan to Newry, Mourne and Down District Council (NMDDC) to protect the service at Daisy Hill following concerns from staff it would be pulled.
“Serious issues” at the maternity department were flagged in chambers after patients were diverted from Daisy Hill to Craigavon area hospital, which led to a motion at NMDDC to prevent a potential relocation of the mother and baby unit.
Newry City Councillor Aidan Mathers said: “My colleague Liz Kimmins MLA has been working with the Trust as well as the Health Minister on the serious issues affecting the maternity services in the Southern Trust in particular Daisy Hill.
“Can you give me an update on the current situation and what work is being done to stabilise this critical service at Daisy Hill and indeed for the whole Southern Trust area?
Challenges facing the hospital included a failure to employ more midwives and consultants. Daisy Hill staff had voiced their concerns in October that some maternity services at the hospital would be temporarily suspended before a solution could be found. The Southern Health Trust has denied it was to pull the service, but admitted that discussions were ongoing as to how best to stabilise maternity services.
Medical director, Stephen Austin responded: ”The most recent update with Daisy Hill maternity services is there has been a lot of work being done to stabilise those.
“The issues were broadly about staffing in two areas. One was about midwifery and the other medical staffing.
“In terms of midwifery there have been recent recruitments to improve the numbers of midwives and those midwives are taking up posts in and around January.
“What we are doing at present is stabilising the service in regards to current staff and whenever the new staff come on board and suitably inducted there will be even more staff to make sure all shifts are better covered. So we are working on that quite extensively at the present time.”
“We are also using agency workers when appropriate to fill in any current gaps.
He added: “In terms of medical staff, it is more of a medium terms issue, where we have had a number of retirements in the Daisy Hill area over the last year and that has added to the difficulty of trying to recruit a new consultant.
“The difficulty is that in Northern Ireland and across the UK there is a national shortage of trained consultants. So we are still recruiting activity for those consultant positions and there are hopefully some interviews happening in the next number of weeks and hopefully we will be successful.”
