HSE failure led to death of Aoife Johnston, says Chief

Chief Executive of the HSE Bernard Gloster has said the health service “failed” Aoife Johnston and that failure “led to her death”.

Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week programme, Mr Gloster apologised on behalf of the health service to the 16-year-old’s family.

“There is only one thing that we can say to them, and that is that we apologise, we are sorry,” he said.

“We failed Aoife, our failure led to her death. We failed them as a family.”

On Friday, a verdict of medical misadventure was returned at the inquest into the death of Ms Johnston.

Ms Johnston, from Shannon in Co Clare, died from meningitis on 19 December 2022.

The 16-year-old had presented at the Emergency Department at University Hospital Limerick two days earlier, with suspected sepsis, but faced a lengthy wait for treatment.

Mr Gloster said that while the question of accountability “remains very much alive for me” it was not one he could preempt or determine until he had studied transcripts from the inquest into Ms Johnston’s death and read the report by retired Chief Justice Frank Clarke.

He said there were no findings against any individuals but said the question of accountability would be addressed “by me alone and without fear or favour”.

In relation to Dr Jim Gray’s description of the emergency department at UHL as being like “a death trap”, Mr Gloster said that even though there was still overcrowding the ED was “much more safe” now.

He said the number of junior doctors, emergency consultants and nurses had all risen since Ms Johnston died and that “many other steps” to improve safety had been taken.

“I’m satisfied that if people need emergency care they should and could attend that department today,” he said.

“But I do understand the concern that people have – and against the backdrop of the very traumatic week that the public experienced. Our job is to work to build people’s confidence and safety assurance in the hospital.”

Mr Gloster said that everybody working in healthcare in the midwest region has a role to play in rebuilding the public confidence and in ensuring that they are honest with people about the pressures they face.

He said that since Ms Johnston’s death, a “substantial” number of the “very serious safety indicators that were obvious then” have been addressed in a way that makes the department safer.

He said there was “no question” that they were not recognising bed capacity as a challenge, but that it comes with the requirement “for multiple changes at multiple levels”.

“Otherwise all the capacity in the world would make no difference,” he said.

When asked about the possibility of reopening emergency departments at Ennis, Nenagh or St John’s, Mr Gloster said the clinical advice was to build capacity in Limerick and build further capacity for support systems in the other hospitals.