Neary inquiry - Publication will bring some closure

THE Medical Council’s decision to put on its website transcripts of the investigation into three disgraced doctors who had exhonorated the appalling practice of Drogheda obstetrician Dr Michael Neary deserves to be applauded.

Whether the obstetricians will be struck off the medical register was unclear following yesterday’s meeting to decide their fate. They had been found guilty of professional misconduct by the council’s fitness to practise committee.

The call for publication had come from Patient Focus, the lobby group representing victims of the horrifying behaviour of the maverick surgeon who now await the council’s verdict.

Putting the facts into the public arena will help bring closure to one of the biggest scandals ever to hit the Irish medical profession. Doubtless, it will also go some way towards portraying the Medical Council in a more positive light, as doctors resist Health Minister Mary Harney’s welcome move to appoint a majority of lay members to the medical profession’s disciplinary body.

The three leading obstetricians gave the maverick surgeon a clean bill of health following a review of his work, after concerns were raised about the abnormally high rate of hysterectomies he had carried out.

In flagrant violation of medical ethics, he ruined the lives of many women under his care, removing the wombs of patients without permission in operations that later transpired were unnecessary.

Outrageously, his peers in the medical profession cleared him to go on working after reviewing nine cases of Caesarean hysterectomies selected by Dr Neary in 1998. Significantly, the verdict of professional misconduct against the three men was upheld by yesterday’s meeting of the full council.

Following publication of the Lourdes Hospital Inquiry report by Judge Maureen Harding Clark, Patient Focus made a formal complaint to the Medical Council about the three obstetricians.

Some indication of the gravity of the collective decision to clear Neary of wrong-doing can be gleaned from the fact that one member of the inspection team was a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, while the other two were a consultant and an obstetrician at the Coombe Women’s Hospital, respectively.

The council has the power to impose a range of sanctions on doctors found guilty of misconduct. They range in severity from mere censure, admonishment or advice, to setting conditions to the retention of a doctor’s name on the medical register, suspending a doctor’s name from the register for a period, or striking a doctor’s name off the register. It remains to be seen what course of action will be taken by the council.

Doctors have a right to appeal to the High Court within 21 days of a sanction being imposed.

Victims are now looking to Ms Harney to meet the March 17 deadline for the establishment of a redress scheme to compensate them for the butchery they have suffered.