Sir, – It was with great sadness that I read Prof Sam Coulter-Smith told an inquest on Tuesday that the Rotunda had “lost control of the process” of how it kept medical records (“Rotunda’s medical notes system could increase patient risk, consultant tells baby inquest”, News, November 8th).
I have been wary of the electronic patient record from its inception, and was one of the people not championing Cork University Maternity Hospital becoming the “first fully digital hospital in Ireland” a few years ago.
Whatever its advantages, the system is indecipherable to the outsider. It consists of a series of computer-generated material on sheets of paper, generally undated, with unhelpful titles such as “Miscellaneous Notes”, “Scanned Documents”, “Orders” and “PowerForm Textual Rendition Notes”, etc.
Very few of these contain any handwriting or any recognisable input from a clinician. Instead they appear to be computer-generated material whose origins are not evident to the reader.
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The system is, for all practical purposes, completely unintelligible to the outsider and it is extremely difficult for those investigating a hospital death to recreate a chronology of events through a careful analysis of it. Issues surrounding the system have already been raised at other inquests, but regrettably nothing has changed.
My thoughts are with the parents of Molly McEvoy, and all those affected. – Yours, etc,
DOIREANN O’MAHONY BL,
Law Library,
Four Courts,
Dublin 7.
