Hospital Services Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-21 ============================================================ Pauline Tully (SF), Cultural and Educational Panel I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach. I wish to raise a couple of cases relating to Cavan General Hospital. Aaron is a 12-year-old boy who was admitted to Cavan General Hospital in severe pain on Monday, 27 April. An ultrasound was carried out and it was determined that he had appendicitis, so he would have keyhole surgery on the Tuesday. On Tuesday morning at 3 a.m., he was in extreme pain and a nurse constantly called for a doctor, but no doctor came. Later on Tuesday morning, he was prepped to go to theatre for the operation. He spent all day waiting while fasting and having no water, and he was not brought to theatre until 10.20 p.m.. A 12-year-old spent a whole day without food or water and was in pain. He had the operation and his parents were told it went fine. However, on Wednesday afternoon, Aaron was very unwell. It was only then that a senior consultant admitted that the appendix had ruptured and that the operation had been much messier than it should have been and they had admitted to. They gave him antibiotics, but the parents were very concerned he would contract sepsis. He remained very unwell in hospital for a few days. He was given a huge cocktail of antibiotics, but it then seemed that the antibiotics were having an adverse effect on his liver. Aaron was taken off those antibiotics and was discharged on Monday, even though there was still an infection in his body. He had to be rushed back to hospital on Tuesday by ambulance, and to Temple Street on Wednesday, where he had surgery on the Friday due to complications in his bowels with an obstruction. We do not know the reasons for that, but we assume it had something to do with the initial keyhole surgery and how it was much messier than it should have been. Aaron is home now but is still very unwell and his parents are very concerned they are not at the end yet. Orán is a 20-year-old who was admitted to hospital on 16 September last year while extremely unwell. He spent all night on a trolley in accident and emergency, with no scans and nobody seeing to him. The next day, 17 September, he got an MRI scan and an ultrasound, which showed he had appendicitis and needed keyhole surgery. An operation was performed at 1.30 p.m., but again, he was very unwell. It was only a couple of days later that the hospital admitted the appendix had ruptured in his case, too. He remained very unwell, and on the Friday, his parents were very worried about him, but there was no doctor to be seen until Monday evening. He spent the whole weekend without a doctor. I also meant to say that, in both cases, a drain was put in and there was a very putrid discharge. Oran ended up having to have another operation on Tuesday and was in the ICU for several days before going back to the ward. He was discharged the following Monday but had to be readmitted on the Thursday, as he was still very unwell. He was eventually transferred to Beaumont a week later. He spent a week in Cavan General Hospital just being managed and then eight days in Beaumont on a cocktail of antibiotics, where they thought they had got him out of bother. However, he ended up back in Beaumont in November, where it turned out that there was a bowel obstruction due to adhesions from the surgery in Cavan. That young man ended up losing out on a semester in college and still has another operation to go to relieve all the issues resulting from the surgery. This is happening too often. There have been several other cases where people have been left too long and their appendixes have also ruptured. We need to see some inquiries being made into this and a proper investigation of what is going on. Is it a case of staff under-resourcing, incompetence by certain members of staff or a combination of both? We really need the Minister for Health to look into this. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-21/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:59+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-21