Cancer mistakes - Diagnosis errors reveal system flaws

In June of this year, the Health Information and Quality Authority announced that a woman had mistakenly been informed in March 2005 that her cancer test was negative. It was a further 14 months before another test showed that she was suffering from cancer.

Rebecca O’Malley went public with her plight to ensure that laboratory-testing services were better run in order to prevent the same thing happening again.

A similar mistake has already been made with another woman, only she had two different test results misread, before a different hospital informed her that she is actually suffering from breast cancer following a third test. Such mistakes, which can mean the difference between life and death, should not happen.

Hopefully, the two women will make a full recovery. If they had been treated when the disease should have been first diagnosed, there is no doubt that the prognosis would have been better.

The health authorities must get to the root cause of these mistakes and implement safeguards to ensure they do not happen again. It is necessary to learn from such mistakes to improve the system.

This should not be a case of a witchhunt to find a guilty individual, but if the mistakes were the result of individual incompetence or carelessness, then, for everybody’s sake, the individuals responsible should be held accountable.