In their own words: Patients and visitors talk about hospital treatment

PATIENTS OF Tallaght hospital expressed concern yesterday at the details of unreported X-rays and unread GP letters, but said it should not overshadow the good work the hospital does.

Diabetic patient Larry Hanway said he had X-rays done on an unrelated shoulder injury two years ago at the hospital and never heard anything back.

However, this week he received an appointment at short notice to see a bone specialist on Monday.

“That was so quick that I’m thinking they are trying to catch up and make up for their mistakes,” he said.

Cancer patient Sean Moore said he was “disappointed” by the revelations, adding that “scandal” was a word the media was using, however – not one he would use.

“I think it is very unfortunate. One is disappointed, and I am disappointed.

“My experience of the hospital is very positive, despite the fact that I’m kind of ill,” he said.

“I’ve had a lot of experience of the radiology unit over the last six months and I have no negative comment to make about them whatsoever.

“I’m not denying what is in the newspapers, but I could not think of a bad word to say about this hospital even in these unhappy circumstances.

“I haven’t had a negative experience, and I’ve been up and down here all the time for the last five months.” His wife Rosemary, who attends the diabetic unit, said: “I have exactly the same experience. It is absolutely and totally 100 per cent positive.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by former patient Anthony Corr, who uses a wheelchair as a result of a tumour on his back. “During the time I was here it was a lovely hospital, and still is a lovely hospital. When I was growing up, the Adelaide and the Meath hospitals were the best hospitals in Dublin because of their Protestant ethos.

“I went in there with a slipped disc and I came out with a tumour in my back, and they discovered it,” he said.

“I’m in a wheelchair, but had they not discovered it, I would be like Superman from the neck down,” he said in a reference to the late actor Christopher Reeve who was paralysed in an accident in 1995.

Mr Corr said Tallaght hospital was overburdened with administrators and not clinicians, but still had some of the best doctors you could find anywhere.

John Kelly, who was visiting his wife’s sister, who has pneumonia, said the problem was individual administrators, and not the hospital. “She couldn’t be getting any better treatment anywhere else in the world,” he said.

His wife Phil said her sister had received one-to-one treatment since her admission to hospital.

“I work in a hospice myself, so I know the HSE. There’s cutbacks everywhere, but what happened in Tallaght was somebody not doing their job,” she said.