Premature baby’s critical surgery cancelled due to budget cuts at Adelaide hospital, mother says

Critical surgery for a baby’s life-threatening condition had to be cancelled at the eleventh hour because the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide did not have the budget to staff an intensive care bed for the infant, her mother says.

Emma Bone’s 10-month-old daughter Willow was born at 28 weeks and has ongoing health issues, including being fed through a tube.

“Her problem is she aspirates her fluid, so it sits in her lungs and causes her to stop breathing which she sort of does on a daily basis, she goes unconscious, she goes blue, she goes floppy,” Ms Bone told ABC Radio Adelaide.

“It can last from 30 seconds to three minutes and she’s needed quite a lot of assistance in hospital with these episodes.

“We’ve been here [at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital] for about five weeks now waiting for tests to come back and we’ve now been given the go-ahead for surgery which unfortunately got cancelled.”

Ms Bone and her husband also have a three-year-old daughter and the family travelled from Kimba on the Eyre Peninsula to Adelaide for special care for Willow who cannot leave the hospital until she has the surgery and recovers.

Ms Bone said after preparing for surgery on Thursday, which included fasting, it was cancelled at the last minute.

“We prepared ourselves that she was undergoing what they say is quite a serious surgery and she would be having a stay in an intensive care unit afterwards, so we arrived, we were told there was a chance it may not be happening because of the shortage of HDU [high-dependency unit] beds,” Ms Bone said.

‘We’d had no contact from anyone’

Ms Bone said they waited for several hours and were told they had a bed and their daughter was next in line for surgery, but they were left waiting and were eventually told it wasn’t going ahead.

“They’d been trying to page doctors all day to see what was going on as Willow had fasted from 3:30 that morning, she’d had bloods the day before to prepare in case she needed blood in surgery, she was exhausted.

“We were told that she was one of the most urgent cases on the list and, yeah, we were quite shocked that it didn’t happen sooner.”

Mother says staff blamed budget cuts

Ms Bone said the surgeon and unit manager told her that budget cuts were to blame.

“They sort of came in and he said everything was a go, the theatre was ready, the surgeons were ready, the bed was ready, it was because they didn’t have the budget to staff the bed in the HDU, that’s why she couldn’t have her surgery,” Ms Bone said.

“He said he was happy to put his hand up and tell us that it’s been ongoing, he told us that if he could, he would come in on Monday on a public holiday to operate on her if there was somewhere for her to go afterwards.

Ms Bone said Willow would be put on an emergency surgery list on Tuesday, after the long weekend, and would need to fast every morning until they found out when the surgery would go ahead.

“As she did yesterday, she’ll fast every morning from 3:00am until they say, ‘Yes or no’, and if they come in on Tuesday and say, ‘No’, then she’ll be fed and then on Wednesday if they say, ‘No’, then it’ll just continue until they have that space or that staffing for her in the HDU,” Ms Bone said.

“She’s exhausted, she’s over being in hospital, she’s spent a lot of time in hospital and so have we.

“We just want to be home and we want her to be safe and I suppose that’s the hard part, we can’t even take her from the hospital because she’s not safe, she can’t leave until she has this surgery.

“So the fact that we’re waiting on a surgery and we don’t know when it’s going to happen makes it very hard to trust in our healthcare system.”

SA Health has been contacted for comment, however, Premier Steven Marshall this morning said the government had increased the budget to the women’s and children’s hospital since it came to government.