SAVITA Halappanavar’s request for an abortion should have been considered days before her death, a draft report has found.
Ms Halappanavar (31) died of a massive infection seven days after being admitted to hospital.
However, an investigation set up by Health Minister James Reilly has uncovered a litany of failures
The Evening Herald today reports details of a draft report by the Health Service Executive into the death of the Indian woman at University Hospital Galway last October, days after her family claim she had asked for but was denied an abortion.
According to the draft report, the infection which led to her death was not diagnosed for three days.
The failures included:
* Tests showing possible blood infection on the day Savita was admitted were never followed up by staff.
* Doctors were often too busy caring for other patients to deal immediately with the mum-to-be, whose condition grew progressively worse as time went on.
* To prevent the spread of infection, staff should have considered performing an abortion – even before the couple requested it.
On the day she was admitted last October, Savita and her husband Praveen were informed that a miscarriage, the most likely cause of which was infection, was inevitable.
The distraught couple repeatedly asked for a termination from the following Tuesday, however staff turned down the request, telling the couple that, as a result of the laws governing abortion, their “hands were tied”.
Instead, doctors chose to “await events”, and seven days after she was admitted Ms Halappanavar died.
She died four days after the foetal heartbeat stopped. An autopsy found Ms Halappanavar had died of septicaemia.
The HSE inquiry into her death was established on November 20th under the chairman ship of Prof Sir Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, head of obstetrics and gynaecology at St George’s Hospital, University of London.
The inquiry team at first included three staff members from Galway University Hospital. However, they were later removed and replaced following objections by Mr Halappanavar.
The full inquest into Ms Halappanavar’s death will start on April 8th at Galway Courthouse and will last a week.
Five expert witnesses will be called, including the former master of the National Maternity Hospital, Peter Boylan.
source
They left a dead fetus inside her for FOUR DAYS?! Everybody who was part of that decision-making process and thought that was a good course of action should face wrongful-death charges.
Getting the law ion place is the first step to stopping this from happening again. Not that it's proving simple to do that. It's pretty much fucked up.
But as it is, it's possible that any doctor performing an abortion, even in these circumstances, risks imprisonment.
If the fetus is dead, how can it be an abortion?
I see.
That's just horrible. An unborn fetus that won't survive anyway takes precedence over the actual living woman. I don't even understand how that sort of stance can be "pro-life", because the woman's life certainly isn't valued.
The fact that you have to fucking legislate for a woman's right to life...I mean fucking really.
Actual, living people have less value than a clump of cells that will never become an actual, living person and will in fact end up causing the death of an actual, living person.
I'm shocked that this actually has to be legislated, because wow. Women have less value than a clump of dying cells.
“Somebody is going to get something wrong that they wouldn’t have otherwise because they are exhausted.”
“You’re just trying to fill out something like a drug card or an X-ray request and everything is much more laborious . . . you fill out a form and it comes back saying you didn’t sign this. If you take it that we have thousands of doctors in the country doing these kind of hours, surely there has to be risk there.”
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/hea
There is so much in the Irish medical system needing reform, and most of it is tied up in the politics of the same party that brought about the bank crisis.
(edited for punctuation fail)
Edited at 2013-02-15 02:09 pm (UTC)