Statement about hospital death was altered when typed, claims nurse

ALTERATIONS had been made in a statement made by a psychiatric nurse about an incident in which a very disturbed patient died at Cork University Hospital when it was returned by a Southern Health Board official to the nurse in typed form, the High Court was told yesterday.

References to the patient lying face down and to the nurse lying across the patient’s back had been deleted, it was claimed.

Pat Healy, who has not worked since the patient’s death on April 21, 1994, also said it was at the inquest into the patient’s death in March 1995 that he learned for the first time the drug Largactyl, which was administered to the patient while he was under restraint, heightens the risk of asphyxia.