A CONSULTANT HAS told the Central Criminal Court that doctors “went against protocols and just ran with things” as they tried to save the life of a five-year-old girl with no pulse who had been stabbed in the heart on a Dublin city centre street.
Dr Michael Boyle, the head of the neonatal department at the Rotunda Hospital, said he believed the little girl was dead when he saw her ‘grey’ skin and failed to find a pulse despite the attempts of paramedics to revive her using CPR.
Dr Boyle was giving evidence in the trial of 52-year-old Riad Bouchaker who denies the attempted murder of the little girl and two other children. He also denies causing serious harm to a crèche worker and assault on two other children and a teenager.
Dr Boyle told prosecuting counsel Carol Doherty BL that he came upon the scene after hearing about a stabbing on Parnell Square East, close to the Rotunda Hospital where he was working. He found lots of people there and his own neonatal transport team attending to the girl after they were flagged down on their way to the Rotunda.
The child, he said, looked grey and paramedics had placed drains in her chest and were doing CPR to try to massage the heart. He said Dr Peter Harper, a paediatric anaesthetist from Temple St Hospital, ‘fortuitously’ happened upon the scene and helped to put a breathing tube into the girl’s airways.
When paramedics paused their chest compressions, Dr Boyle said he checked for a pulse at the girl’s femoral artery but found nothing.
Another doctor from the Rotunda had ordered blood to be sent immediately, and the decision was taken to carry out a transfusion in the ambulance. He said they “went against protocols and just ran with things” because they wanted to act as quickly as possible. They decided to take the girl to the nearest hospital at Temple St, even though they knew there was no cardiothoracic surgeon there. “She didn’t have time to go anywhere else,” he said.
Dr Boyle said he needed to bypass the emergency department because that would have delayed her getting to the operating theatre. While the ambulance transported the little girl, Dr Boyle ran to Temple St and told the emergency staff that the patient was not to come to them. He then ran to the operating theatre to make space and asked a colleague to call the Mater hospital to get them to send a heart surgeon immediately.
Ms Doherty asked what Dr Boyle thought when he couldn’t find a pulse at the girl’s femoral artery. “I thought she was dead,” he said.