Investigation: Staff at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda are bracing themselves for severe criticism today when the report of an investigation into how so many Caesarean hysterectomies were allowed to be carried out at the hospital for more than two decades without anyone intervening is published.
The report, from Judge Maureen Harding Clark, will express shock at the number of hysterectomies which were carried out on young women at the hospital between 1974 and 1989. The former Drogheda obstetrician Dr Michael Neary carried out 129 of 188 peripartum hysterectomies (those done within six weeks of giving birth) in this period. He was struck off the medical register in 2003 over the unnecessary removal of the wombs of 10 women.
The report has been unable to establish exactly why this happened or why nobody noticed. There was no regular audit of practices at the hospital's maternity unit which would have shown clearly its Caesarean hysterectomy rate was a multiple of the national average. And Dr Neary never attended further training once he took up his post in 1974.
Judge Harding Clark calls for regular audits and for there to be a legal obligation on medical staff to undergo further training throughout their careers.
Her report, which runs to more than 300 pages, also reveals that the files of 44 patients who underwent hysterectomies are missing. The majority of these, some 38 files, relate to former patients of Dr Neary. The report concludes the files were "intentionally identified, traced and removed from the hospital" but is unable to establish who took them. A fresh Garda inquiry into the missing files will be called for by patients.
Patient Focus, which represents women whose files were stolen, wants a redress board set up to compensate those affected.
The inquiry report will be considered at today's meeting of the Cabinet before it is published.
Yesterday, the Minister for Health Mary Harney refused to say if a redress board would be set up. "I'm not going to comment in advance of the publication tomorrow," she said.
She added that she will be using the report to inform the content of the new Medical Practitioners Bill which is currently being drafted.
"It has huge implications obviously for how health facilities are managed and how medical audits are done. And I think we need to learn a lot from it. It's a very robust report, it's an excellent report, very comprehensive," she said.
Fidelma Geraghty, one of the women who believes her womb was removed unnecessarily by Dr Neary, said it beggared belief that nobody in the hospital knew what was going on.
Dr Alf Nicholson, current chairman of the hospital's medical board, said the practices highlighted in the report should never have happened and should not have been allowed to continue for so long.
Last night, the Fine Gael health spokesman Dr Liam Twomey said Ms Harney should introduce legislation to protect whistleblowers in the health service. It took a recently appointed midwife to the Drogheda Hospital in 1998 to blow the whistle on Dr Neary.