Not according to Dr Ingall
Mum told to head south: doctor
EXCLUSIVE
NATASHA ROBINSON
NSW doctors treating a pregnant woman whose twin babies needed urgent surgery claim senior clinicians at Queensland’s Mater Hospital told them that “given the political situation” of border closures the mother should be transported 750km south to Sydney rather than be operated on in Brisbane. A political row over border closures has gained intensity after it emerged that one of the twin girls carried by Ballina mother Kimberley Brown died after intrauterine surgery performed by doctors at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. On August 13, an obstetrician at Lismore Base Hospital in northern NSW spoke with the director of maternal fetal medicine at the Mater Hospital and discussed Ms Brown’s urgent need for surgery. Lismore paediatrician Chris Ingall, who sits on the executive of the medical staff council at Lismore Base Hospital and has spoken directly with Ms Brown’s treating obstetricians, said the case was agreed by all clinicians to be urgent. “The Mater Hospital agreed it was an urgent case but they said given the political situation the woman needed to be sent to Sydney ,” Dr Ingall said. Mater denies the claim. “We didn’t deny access and always were happy to provide care if RPA weren’t able to do so,” a spokesperson said. Patients requiring emergency medical care are allowed to be treated in Queensland hospitals despite the border closure, but Dr Ingall said that in practice, doctors were facing bureaucratic barriers to getting patients urgent care. “We at this point here are totally bamboozled by the answers we’re getting from both the governments and also the hospitals,” Dr Ingall said. “Because we need to get a double tick. We need to get a tick on both the bureaucratic and political masters and also the health administrators that cases are an emergency. So we’ve got no way of telling what is going to happen.” The Northern NSW Local Health District said surgery in Brisbane would not have been a feasible option because Ms Brown would have been required to quarantine in Queensland for 14 days before having surgery. Queensland Health says, however, that emergency cases receive urgent care. It’s unclear whether Ms Brown’s case qualified as an emergency despite doctors on both sides of the border agreeing the situation was urgent. “While the preferred location for the family to give birth was at a hospital in Brisbane, under the Queensland Border Direction at the time, the woman and her partner would have had to quarantine in a government hotel for 14 days, at their own expense, prior the procedure,” said Northern NSW Local Health District chief executive Wayne Jones.” Ms Brown’s babies, which at the time were 24 weeks’ gestation, were affected by twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, in which twins share one placenta and the blood flow of one baby is channelled through the other. Ms Brown required highly specialised intra-uterine surgery that could only be performed in Sydney or Brisbane. “The twin that’s giving blood to the other twin doesn’t grow as well. So that’s what was happening here and it was being closely monitored,” Dr Ingall said. “But it got to a point where the smaller twin was in jeopardy. And the surgery requires actually in utero surgery to stop the twin-totwin transfusion from occurring.” Ms Brown and her husband Scott remain in Sydney as doctors monitor the progress of the surviving twin. Ms Brown’s father, Allan Watt, told The Weekend Australian he had “done nothing but cry for the last 24 hours” . “The other bub is struggling along and they want to keep her in the womb until she’s 28 weeks,” he said. “If they had both been at 28 weeks there would have been a fair chance of saving the other bub, but she was just too young to be born.” Mr Watt, who is in Ballina while his wife and daughter are in Sydney, said their family had been “divided” by border closures and travel restrictions. Despite the Queensland health department saying exemptions were not necessary in emergency cases, it is understood the family was told that a medical exemption was needed for Ms Brown to cross the border. “They took the option to go to Sydney because it would take too long to get an exemption,” Mr Watt said. Mr Watt said his daughter waited at Lismore Base Hospital for 16 hours before she was flown by air ambulance to RPA to undergo emergency surgery. Mr Brown took a Jetstar flight to Sydney and arrived there 10 hours before an air retrieval flight carrying his wife landed at 1am. Dr Ingall said it was not possible to determine whether Ms Brown’s baby would have survived if she had received surgery sooner in Brisbane. “It is possible that if she’d been quickly transferred to Brisbane , she may have had a better outcome. That’s a possibility.” Copyright © 2020 News Pty Limited