It seems my general reluctance to place myself in the hands of our State health system has been reinforced yet again.

My married daughter recently went to bed feeling unwell with a touch of the vomits and diarrhoea, comfortable in the belief she had slight food poisoning. Come the early hours however, she was violently ill with severe abdominal pain, cold sweats and dry wretching.

What happened then and in the days following was a debacle worthy only of a third world country and included three ambulance emergency rides, three short stays in a public hospital and one in a private hospital. With the latter cut short because it was decided, after admitting her, that they couldn’t accept her HCF Top Cover.

Although seen by numerous doctors not one could give her a definitive diagnosis but what did become clear, and was said several times, was that she should not have been released by the public hospital following either of her two emergency visits there.

On her third public hospital stay, an overnighter, she was placed in the infectious diseases ward - but still without a proper diagnosis.

Why the infectious diseases ward you might ask? A good question. Perhaps it was the only available bed (unlikely) or maybe it simply seemed a good idea at the time, or, was it a case of passing the buck? Who knows?

Throughout each of her public hospital visits she had received no specific treament, other than for a drip, because nobody seemed to know what it was they were to treat her for. This is not meant as a critism of the staff as some conditions do not present in a clear and concise way, but in this day and age surely, somebody, somewhere, would have had the answer. I guess it boils down to how little time emergency ward doctors can devote to one patient?

Between hospital visits, it was also necessary to have a doctor visit my daughter at home because of ongoing pain, diarrhoea and vomiting, and, with her thinking better that than re-visiting the public hospital - and for what?

Even getting a doctor for a home visit was a trial. It seems that if you are normally of good health, with no regular need of a doctors advice, you are not then intitled to a home visit by your doctor of choice but must instead use the after hours house call service, even if that means waiting the whole day for 5pm to come around.

Is it small wonder then that the hospital system is over stretched and underfunded? With home visits by doctors both restrictive and expensive, the public hospital is the only option available to people not able to visit the doctor’s surgery for urgent matters.

The only positive but very satifying aspect of this sorry saga was that, apart from her questionable early release from the same public hospital on two occasions - which may well be indicative of the pressures hospital doctors are under - my daughter found all the doctors and nurses, as well as the ambulance teams, very professional, supportive and compassionate.

A week later, my daughter is still unwell, but to a lesser degree, and on the advice of her newly found doctor - the lovely lady who visited her at home - is undergoing CTscans and more blood tests to determine the cause of her problem.

Now that my daughter is under the care of her lady doctor we feel confident she is in good hands and wait to see how the week pans out for her.