Ahern denies deliberate cover-up of cancer scare

TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern has denied there was a deliberate move to suppress the scale of a cancer misdiagnosis scare involving a Finnish pathologist despite top officials agreeing to withhold details from the public.

The Irish Examiner revealed on Saturday that the Department of Health and Health Service Executive (HSE) jointly agreed not to release the number of cancer patients feared to have been misdiagnosed by Dr Antoine Geagea at Cork University Hospital (CUH) last year and that the Government was made aware of the plan.

The strategy was adopted so as not to “cause widespread alarm in the public and unnecessary confusion in the media”. However, a review into the work of Dr Geagea, who has since resigned, is still under way and it remains unclear how many patient files he worked on in CUH and his previous posting in Galway.

Mr Ahern yesterday rejected claims that information was withheld to play down the issue. “Suppression of information like that would not be acceptable. That is not what happened.”

“The officials were endeavouring to ensure that they had a proper communications strategy and they were looking after the patients’ safety. There was no in any way suppression. It was in the interests of patients.”

His comments were later echoed by Health Minister Mary Harney who was quizzed on the issue by Fine Gael TD Bernard Allen at the Oireachtas Health Committee.

“Are the HSE and the Department of Health in an exercise to falsify the true account of the situation involving patients at CUH?” he asked.

Ms Harney replied that there was “no question of information being suppressed”.

However, she indicated that the new ‘serious incident protocol’ to be adopted in the wake of the separate crisis over misdiagnoses of cancer from mammograms taken at Portlaoise Hospital would follow a similar news blackout approach, with information being restricted to patients centrally involved in any future incident.

“We have got to get away from these big announcements about numbers,” she said. “From here on in we want to make sure that when there are serious incidents that the patients are contacted personally or directly, that they don’t learn from media or the political system or whoever.”

HSE chief executive Brendan Drumm said the new protocol would present challenges. “All the information will have to remain inside until investigations are complete,” he said.

“The other challenge you have is if you are going to review 3,000 mammograms, do you tell all 3,000 women about a review that’s going to take a number of months or do you review then and tell them when it’s complete? That’s a huge decision which is not easy for me or anyone else to make.”