A 47-year-old Co Tipperary woman whose treatment by a hospital has been described by a High Court judge as grossly negligent, has been awarded €75,000 damages for personal injuries.
Mr Justice Seán Ryan said that when surgeon Raymond Howard directed in 1996 that Anne English be transferred from St Joseph’s Hospital, Clonmel, to Our Lady’s Hospital, Cashel, he had failed to spot she was suffering from an ectopic pregnancy.
The judge said Ms English, a Clonmel mother of two, had been close to death when the pregnancy ruptured in the Cashel hospital and she was taken by ambulance to Clonmel for life-saving surgery.
Holding the Health Service Executive 60 per cent liable for what had happened to Ms English and Clonmel surgeon Dr Howard 40 per cent liable, the judge told her counsel, Dr John F O’Mahony SC, she was entitled to a global award of €75,000.
Dr O’Mahony had told the court it was almost 16 years since Ms English had been admitted to St Joseph’s with a suspected molar pregnancy, a very unusual condition in which abnormal growth occurs instead of foetal tissue.
It had transpired she had the much more common complication of an ectopic pregnancy, in which the embryo implants outside the uterus, usually in a fallopian tube.
The judge said Dr Howard, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, transferred Ms English, said to be in severe and continuous pain, to Cashel 20 miles away for a surgical opinion, noting the possibility of acute retrocecal appendicitis.
Doctors at Cashel decided she did not have this and directed her transfer back to Clonmel with a note recording “bleeding intra-abdominally”.
The judge said that in a critical condition she had been transferred back to St Joseph’s by ambulance, accompanied by a doctor. On arrival she had been seen by Dr Howard and immediately transferred to the operating theatre, where measures had to be taken to resuscitate her.
The judge said it had transpired that Ms English had an ectopic pregnancy and had suffered very substantial blood loss. Some three litres of blood were removed from her peritoneal cavity.
The judge held that the South Eastern Health Board, now the HSE, and Dr Howard were concurrent wrongdoers. Dr Howard had seen Ms English on October 8th, 1996, when there was sufficient information for a diagnosis of likely ectopic pregnancy.
When she deteriorated the following morning and showed symptoms of bleeding, the doctor had been slow to respond. His continued failure to spot the ectopic pregnancy and his decision to transfer her to Cashel had been serious mistakes. The following morning at Cashel, when her ectopic pregnancy finally ruptured, it was no exaggeration to say she had been close to death.
“The decision to transfer her from the Cashel hospital to Clonmel in this state amounted to gross negligence,” the judge said.