The Health Service Executive has admitted it has not yet looked for a person to co-ordinate the audit of all clinical activity at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda.
Chris Lyons, the manager of the northeast hospital network, said yesterday the post, recommended by Judge Maureen Harding Clark in her Lourdes Hospital Inquiry report, had not yet been advertised. However, he stressed this did not mean there was no audit of clinical outcomes at the hospital at present. He insisted clinical audit was taking place at the hospital.
"We are constantly looking at the services that we provide and I would say to you that we do need to increase the number of clinical audit staff that we have got out there. It's a continuous process. We have made a start and we are going in the right direction," he told LMFM radio. "We haven't appointed the dedicated audit officer into the Lourdes Hospital yet. We haven't advertised that post yet," he said.
He added that one person was not going to make a difference if there was not a culture in the hospital among staff of constantly reviewing their practice. "I would accept fully that a clinical audit co-ordinator would help facilitate that process better but please don't anyone go away after listening to this interview and think that there is no ongoing evaluation of clinical services in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital.
"It's probably one of the hospitals in the country where there have been significant strides in that direction and I would accept fully that we do need to enhance our capacity even further and that's what we intend doing," he said.
The Lourdes Hospital inquiry looked into the high rate of Caesarean hysterectomies at the hospital - many of them conducted by the now struck-off obstetrician Dr Michael Neary. Published in March it found "meaningful audit is not yet in place" at the hospital.
Two months after the report was published, Judge Harding Clark told a conference in Dublin she was concerned the HSE was failing to implement her report's recommendations.
The chairman of the Lourdes hospital's medical board, Dr Alf Nicholson, told the radio station he and his colleagues wanted all recommendations in the report implemented.