ABNORMAL TEST results taken on a public patient in a hospital lay unopened in a consultant’s cubby-hole for two weeks and when they were discovered following inquiries by a GP the patient had died, the Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has told a conference.
Speaking at a Public Affairs Ireland conference yesterday, Ms O’Reilly expressed concern at the “major inequality” that arose as a result of the continued existence of the public/private system.
Ms O’Reilly said that in the recent controversy at Tallaght hospital over unopened referral letters and unread X-rays, health authorities had not provided answers to the media on the breakdown of public and private patients involved.
However, she said that based on her experience in examining a recent case and assuming the problem wasn’t unique to Tallaght, she would be surprised if the forthcoming report on the controversy “didn’t show that the private patients were more likely to have had their referrals attended to and their X-rays reported on”.
She said that her office had recently investigated a case which concerned a woman who was suffering from a chronic condition which had possible respiratory and cardiac implications.
She said that the patient’s condition deteriorated and that her GP had sent her for an assessment in a local hospital. “Tests were subsequently done in a different hospital and results, which showed significant abnormalities, were sent by ordinary post to the referring consultant in the local hospital. Some days later, as the test results continued to sit in the consultant’s cubbyhole in the public patients’ office, the woman died suddenly.
“Now, at this point, I should say that there is no evidence whatsoever that the death would have been prevented had the test results been attended to speedily. But the distress caused to her husband and children by the knowledge that abnormal results had not been opened and reviewed, can be imagined,” she said.
Ms O’Reilly said that it appeared arrangements for dealing with the test results of private patients operated somewhat differently to those of public patients.
“In the case of a public patient, I was told by the hospital that test results were sent to the public patients’ office and that the onus was on the consultant to collect them. Occasionally, when letters were stacking up, a member of the secretarial staff might alert a consultant to this fact; but there was no system in place to ensure that this happened.
“In contrast, it was clear that private patients had their test results opened by the particular consultant’s private secretary on a daily basis. In this way, the private secretary was in a position immediately to draw the attention of the consultant to any results that might be of concern,” she said.
Ms O’Reilly said that in this case, unusually, the consultant concerned disputed the hospital’s account of the arrangements that applied for dealing with test results.
“He maintained that all test results, whether for public or private patients, went to his private office. This itself raises a great many questions about the propriety, if it is the case, of a private employee apparently dealing with the medical records of public patients,” she said.
Ms O’Reilly said that in any event she had established that in this particular case of the public patient her abnormal test results did not go to the consultant’s private office.
“Rather, they lay unopened for almost two weeks in the hospital’s public patient office. When the test results were opened, which happened because the GP made inquiries, the patient had been dead for 10 days,” she said. In her speech, Ms O’Reilly did not identify the hospital concerned.