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Friday, March 12, 2010
A LEADING patient group warned Health Minister Mary Harney that Tallaght Hospital was a crisis waiting to happen as early as 2007.
In the aftermath of the X-ray scandal revelations on Tuesday, Ms Harney insisted she was not aware of the exact issues behind the situation until this week.
However, the Tallaght Hospital Action Group said it told the minister in a letter sent three years ago that an increasing workload was putting the facility’s patients in danger.
And noting a widely circulated leaflet from the letter and parliamentary questions it had raised in Dáil in 2008, the group’s chairperson, Triona Murphy, alleged that senior officials have been fully aware of inadequate staffing and poor finances at the hospital for years.
"We had a leaflet with those exact details published in March 2008, we raised those exact issues with TDs and that was after we had written to the minister," the Dublin-based nurse explained.
"We had parliamentary questions on these issues raised, but the only response we received was that it was a matter for the HSE.
"There have been huge shortages of staff, huge delays and we warned them that it was only going to be a matter of time before some crisis hit.
"Tallaght has twice the number of emergency department visits and outpatients than somewhere like St Vincent’s, but we have half the consultants.
"We told people back in 2007 and 2008, that because of the shortages of radiologists, MRIs and other scans were being sent to other hospitals, but nobody listened."
The comments were made after the HSE confirmed it planned to commission an expert "independent of Tallaght Hospital" to uncover the exact reasons behind what happened at the hospital.
While it was widely expected that the Health Information Quality Authority (HIQA) would lead such an investigation, a spokesperson for the group last night said the independent organisation was unaware of the plans.
The HSE has also asked its Serious Untoward Incident Unit to examine the possibility that the Tallaght crisis is being repeated in other parts of the country.
Speaking at the regional health forum in Cork yesterday, HSE South regional director of operations, Pat Healy, said the investigation was at an early stage.
However, he added that "nothing of any significant order" was expected to emerge in HSE South hospitals.
During the meeting, Fianna Fáil south Tipperary councillor, Dr Seán McCarthy, claimed that while there were clear "governance problems" at Tallaght, the issue had been overstated. He claimed that two serious errors – a patient’s death and a cancer diagnosis – out of 57,921 X-rays was within acceptable parameters.
However, his comments were heavily criticised by other health forum members as being politically motivated.
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