“I would have torn the place apart”. That is what Aoife Johnston’s father, James Johnston, said he would have done had he suspected that his daughter was in danger of dying while in the emergency department of University Hospital Limerick (UHL).
Breaking their silence on the tragic death of their 16-year-old daughter to tonight’s RTÉ Prime Time programme, Aoife Johnston’s parents, James and Carol, described their horrific ordeal watching their daughter become progressively sicker as they waited for her to get the antibiotics which would almost certainly have saved her if they had been given in time.
There was a 13-and-a-half-hour gap between Aoife being seen by a GP and to when she received the required antibiotics for sepsis. The drugs were administered too late to save her and she died of meningitis on December 19, 2022.
“I do firmly believe that if Aoife was in a different hospital, she would have survived that night,” Carol Johnston told RTÉ’s Prime Time.
The couple were speaking out in the wake of the report commissioned by HSE CEO Bernard Gloster. It was carried out by former Chief Justice Frank Clarke and concluded that had Aoife been given the correct treatment on time, her death “would almost certainly have been avoidable”.
According to the letter of referral given to her parents by the Shannondoc GP, Aoife should have been treated as a patient with suspected septicemia.
‘You need to go in and help that girl’
Triaged as a high-priority patient, she should have been seen by a doctor within 10 to 15 minutes of arriving at the emergency department, according to an inquest into her death at Kilmallock Corner’s Court in Limerick last April.
But James and Carol Johnston described a situation where nothing was progressing except Aoife’s distressed state, which became so acute that they had to push two chairs together so she could lie down to get some relief.
Aoife continued vomiting throughout the night, her skin became blotchy and her temperature was very high as time marched on.
“The two of us were going in and out, begging for help. It came to a point that we were arguing amongst ourselves … about who would go out next. We felt we were annoying the staff. I just kept saying, ‘please help us,’” James said.
“There was other patients on trolleys and they were shouting for Aoife saying, ‘you need to go in and help that girl’. But no one came in to us.”
At the inquest, it was revealed that one doctor was left to manage 191 patients the night Aoife died.
Carol said the family were left together in a room that seemed to be for storing PPE and other equipment.
“We felt Aoife was the sickest (patient) there. There were just the nurses coming in and out and the nurses never picked up on it,” she said.
By the early hours of the morning, James said the family became frantic to get help for Aoife.
“I went down and let a big roar out, cursing and everything that ‘you need to go in there and help my daughter,’ because we knew that she was seriously ill. She was barely standing. And that’s when they seemed to make a bit of a move,” James said.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t blame myself for not doing more. I just didn’t think she was going to die. If I had known, I would have torn the place apart,” he added.
“Aoife was making wailing sounds and fitting out. I was told to hold on to her legs and you [Carol] were told to hold on to her arms. This is our daughter. While they were trying to get these machines hooked up to her, they kept telling us to talk to her. But Aoife was gone. She was just gone. It was horrible,” James added.
Carol Johnston described how she and her husband “were so scared. If that was what we were feeling, what was Aoife thinking? What were her last thoughts?”
‘No findings of accountability’
As Aoife was moved to the resus area of the UHL emergency department, and was placed in an induced coma in an attempt to take pressure off her brain, the horrifying truth began to dawn on her family.
Carol described how they were sitting outside the ICU waiting for news, and “around six doctors came in. And I remember my sister was beside me and I said, ‘she’s gone.’”
James said that he “begged them to take her to Dublin or to Cork, to please, please, just try. But there was nothing they could do.”
The Johnstons say that the Clarke report does not resolve anything or give them any answers as to why their daughter died.
“I know (UHL is) overcrowded. I know there’s a lot wrong with the hospital. We can’t just accept that. Definitely on the night, it went wrong in other ways, not just through overcrowding,” Carol said.
“We learned nothing new from that report. There were no findings of accountability.”
The Johnstons said their lives have completely changed since Aoife’s death and not for the better.
“We can’t go into her bedroom. No one has been in there since she died. The door is locked. We celebrated her 18th birthday at the grave, letting off balloons with her friends. It’s madness,” said James.
Speaking to Prime Time presenter Miriam O’Callaghan, the Johnstons’ solicitor, Damien Tansey, said that the only way there will be accountability for Aoife’s death will be through a statutory inquiry.
“A statutory inquiry will have the authority to call witnesses, hear evidence under oath, and make findings of fact,” he said.
If this does not happen, he said, “we will be in the dark. And the HSE will be in the dark”.
