PATIENT representatives have called on the chairman of Tallaght Hospital to resign and its chief executive to step aside.
In an unprecedented move, the Irish Patients’ Association called for the removal of senior management at the Dublin hospital until the "dysfunctionality" that lead to the scandal of 58,000 X-rays not being properly checked is uncovered.
In a statement, the association called on Tallaght Hospital chairman Lyndon MacCann to go. Patients representatives also want the hospital designate chief executive, Kevin Conlon, to leave his position.
"It is with regret that we make this unprecedented call from the Irish Patients’ Association to ask Mr Lyndon MacCann, chairman of Tallaght Hospital, to resign and Professor Conlon, chief executive designate of Tallaght Hospital, to stand aside until the dysfunctionality of all processes and inter-relationships between all agencies that lead to this scandal are fully investigated and completed," the statement read.
Stephen McMahon, the patients’ group’s chairman, said the scandal at Tallaght Hospital could lead to an even bigger fall-out than the activities of disgraced obstetrician Michael Neary at Drogheda Hospital.
"The system is dysfunctional and 57,000 films went astray and it has got to do with governance.
"An expectation of any inquiry is that it would strengthen governance in the hospital systems.
"When Neary happened, there was the Medical Practitioners Act, there was a whole range of new competencies the doctors had to demonstrate.
"The effect of this could be very significant in the way our health service is managed.
"It has a far wider reach [than Neary] on the management of the healthcare system, while Neary was more on the clinical governance side of things," he said.
The Health Service Executive has said it cannot provide assurances to patients that their X-rays have now been reviewed, until an audit of all hospitals is complete.
It comes after it emerged that the mass of unchecked X-rays has led to at least two delayed cancer diagnoses. At least one of those patients has since died.
Now thousands of patients face an anxious wait as hospital records are scrutinised.
But it has also emerged that Health Minister Mary Harney was informed about concerns over the unchecked X-rays back in December during a meeting with Tallaght Hospital chief executive Kevin Conlon.
Over 40 letters were written by consultant radiologists at Tallaght to management over a four-year period expressing concerns over the amount of work they were undertaking and expected to do, the Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association has claimed.
But hospital chairman Lyndon MacCann yesterday replied to claims that a Tallaght-based GP had written to him expressing concerns about the problem with X-rays in April 2009.
The hospital chairman claimed he had only learned yesterday that Dr Tom O’Dowd had done so.
While the letter was stamped as received by the chief executive’s office on April 27 last year, Mr MacCann said he had not known of the letter until yesterday.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, March 12, 2010
