Twenty twenty-four was a year of trying to keep the major capital projects moving forward and at the same time managing with an increasingly busy service across pregnancy-related care, Gynaecology and Neonatal Paediatrics. On a national or regional level the RCSI Hospital Group was replaced by a new structure of health areas which incorporated primary and secondary care. Within each new each health region there are Integrated Health Areas or IHA’s and each had its own manager. I do believe that the Rotunda has been particularly fortunate with the configuration of these health areas and we now find ourselves more closely aligned with our historic and major clinical partner, the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital. I think that we have also been fortunate in that our IHA manager is Ms. Mellany McLoone and the CEO of our new health region is Ms. Sara Long. The Rotunda has managed to quickly develop relationships with both these people and I am confident that they have been and will continue to be, very supportive of women’s health.
We again experienced an increase in the demand for our pregnancy-related care delivering 8,324 women. We have also experienced a significant increase in our gynaecology workload with the number of referrals now over 1,000/month and a subsequent knock-on effect in terms of an increase in our day case and inpatient gynaecology activity. Our neonatal service continues to offer excellent care in physicalsurroundings which are a constant challenge, especially in terms of preventing infection.
In 2023 we had truly remarkable figures for the number of perinatal deaths and the number of babies who required therapeutic hypothermia. While this year’s figures have also been excellent we have noticed an increase in the number of stillbirths and early neonatal deaths. There has also been an increase in the number of babies treated with therapeutic hypothermia and I think that this is inevitable when you have an intervention that has been shown to reduce cerebral palsy rates by 50%. The consequence of such a successful intervention is that inevitably it is applied to a broader group of newborns. What is reassuring is that the adjusted perinatal mortality rate for normally formed infants born weighing more than 2,500 grams is 0.9/1000. This figure is in many ways the most important metric for comparing care between care providers and should, I believe, be used for comparing hospital care with other services such as homebirths or a free birth service. – Prof Sean Daly, Master of the Rotunda Hospital.