AS DOZENS more women contacted helplines set up by the Health Service Executive (HSE) yesterday in the wake of the miscarriage misdiagnosis controversy, Minister for Health Mary Harney defended her handling of the crisis so far.
In her first public comments on the matter, she said she wanted to express her sympathy, support and solidarity with the women who had come forward this week “and had such a traumatic and terrible experience both for themselves and their families”.
She said she may not have been on radio or TV since the controversy broke, but that did not mean she was not working hard “to put right in so far as we can our obstetrics services around the country”.
It emerged on Tuesday that Melissa Redmond from Donabate, Dublin, was prescribed an abortifacient after an initial scan at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda in July 2009 showed no foetal heartbeat. However, before taking the drugs and acting on her own instinct that she was still pregnant, she sought another scan from her GP who discovered the baby was alive. Her son Michael was born in March.
Since her case came to light, several other women across the State have come forward saying were it not for them also insisting on second scans, their toddlers might not be alive today.
Dr Tony Holohan, chief medical officer at the Department of Health, said the department had believed the Drogheda case was “an isolated case” and had treated it as such when it heard about it.
The HSE says it will review all incidents of misdiagnosed miscarriage which have occurred over the past five years. But Cathriona Molloy of Patient Focus said this may not go back far enough.
Explaining the five-year timeframe, Prof Michael Turner, clinical lead of the HSE’s obstetrics programme, said five years had been chosen “to get enough cases to be able to learn some lessons as to how we can improve the services over the next five years”.
He said: “We probably need to go back five years because it’s important to realise that the numbers are relatively small. Bear in mind that there are approximately 80,000 pregnancies per annum in the country and, in the first decade of the 21st century, there’s probably been about three-quarters of a million pregnancies and to date a relatively small number of cases have emerged and I hope it will stay relatively small.”
Dr Barry White, national director of quality and clinical care with the HSE, said he was not sure going back 10 or even 15 years would help them make decisions at this time and improve patient safety in the future.
There were a further 63 calls from concerned women to the Lourdes hospital helpline yesterday and another 87 to the HSE’s national information line.
Many of the calls to the Lourdes hospital line were from women who had received their treatment in other hospitals.
The HSE has asked women who may be concerned about a diagnosis of miscarriage to contact the maternity hospital at which they received treatment.
Contact details for the hospitals are available on the HSE website, www.hse.ie and from the HSE Infoline on 1850 24 1850.