Patients ‘extremely worried’ about standard of care

PATIENT groups at Tallaght Hospital said people are “extremely worried” about the quality of care there after the Health Service Executive confirmed that 3,500 referral letters from GPs were not opened by consultants, on top of the 58,000 X-rays that had not been read by radiologists.

The HSE rejected assertions from a GP that 30,000 referral letters were “lying in bags” around the hospital.

Vice-chairman of Tallaght Hospital Action Group, Richie O’Reilly, said that people were now querying whether consultants had been ignoring public referrals while following up requests from private patients.

Despite repeated questioning to the hospital, they have not provided details of how this scandal affected private patients. Mr O’Reilly also queried yesterday why more GPs “weren’t shouting about the fact that they weren’t getting any response to their letters”.

Dublin South West TD, Pat Rabbitte, said his constituents “can’t come to terms” with the concept of a GP’s referral concerning a sick patient not being addressed. “I have had very many upset people on to me. One woman was very concerned that her mother, who has since passed away, was detrimentally affected by the X-rays not being read by radiologists,” he said.

Fine Gael’s health spokesman, James O’Reilly, described the failure to follow up referral letters as “like physically turning your back on a patient who may be worried, who may have painful, distressing symptoms, who may turn out to have a serious illness.”

Minister for State, Conor Lenihan, who has called for the 22-person board to be reduced in size and for the implementation of management review, said he will meet with hospital unions and management today.

Hospital management are also due to meet with local GPs today to discuss the ongoing revelations.

Tallaght Hospital yesterday said that there was no current backlog of GP referral letters as the issue had been addressed since last October when the 3,500 unprocessed letters were detected.

A spokesman for the Irish Hospital Consultants Association last night refused to comment on why consultants had not been opening referral letters.

The crisis came to light in January 2009, when Professor Tom O’Dowd, a Tallaght GP and public health specialist at Trinity College, wrote to the then acting chief executive expressing concerns that referral letters were not being followed up. He later raised the issue of X-rays not being checked by a radiologist.

Yesterday, he told RTÉ Radio that he believes that the then acting chief executive “didn’t understand” the gravity of the problem.

Despite raising the issue repeatedly with hospital management, nothing was done about addressing the X-ray backlog or improving GP referral systems until the Health Information and Quality Authority became involved in April 2009.

However, it wasn’t until a new chief executive took over last December before the hospital initiated an internal audit and found a backlog of 58,000 – and not 4,000 – X-rays.

Health Minister Mary Harney was told of the unfolding saga in December but claims she wasn’t made aware of the extent of the problem until this week.

In the coming days, the HSE will issue details on the terms of reference and the chairperson of the independent review into the circumstances which led to the accumulation of unreported X-rays.

Earlier this week, the HSE’s Serious Untoward Incident Unit began a national audit on Wednesday of radiology reporting at its hospitals and voluntary hospitals.

A national protocol on radiology reporting is also be devised so that all the country’s hospitals are treating X-rays in a uniform way.