Medical students denied jabs at Coombe in favour of family of staff, claims TCD professor
MEDICAL students who were on standby to receive Covid vaccines were skipped in favour of family members of staff at the Coombe Hospital, a review has been told.
Prof. Deirdre Murphy, head of the department of obstetrics at Trinity College Dublin, has informed investigators that hospital management were made aware of the 39 waiting students an hour before vaccines were given to the 16 relatives.
The Irish Times reported that Prof. Murphy made the disclosure in a letter to Brian Brian Kennedy SC, the lawyer carrying out a review of the episode for the board of the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital.
She said that two days after two of his own children were vaccinated, the master of the Coombe, Prof. Michael O’Connell, told a senior colleague the hospital was ‘not in a position’ to vaccinate the students.
In January, Prof. O’Connell apologised after it emerged that the hospital had given vaccines to family members of staff.
He said he had made ‘every effort to prioritise and identify additional frontline workers’ for the vaccines on the evening it occurred.
However, Prof. Murphy described the arguments put forward by Prof. O’Connell as ‘untenable’ and says she is ‘personally embarrassed’ by his behaviour.
In her letter, Prof. Murphy said the hospital’s senior executive team knew the medical students were on standby to receive vaccines. The Health Service Executive had advised that the students be vaccinated alongside other health staff during their hospital placements. At the time, the 39 students were on placement in obstetrics, with some of them working overnight on the labour ward.
TCD requested that the hospital vaccinate the students and was asked to supply information. New PPS numbers had to be obtained for the international students, many of them from high-risk black and Asian ethnic groups, according to Prof. Murphy.
She said the students were advised to remain on standby for vaccination, ‘in the hope there would be surplus vaccine after all frontline healthcare staff had been vaccinated’.
A spokeswoman for the Coombe Women and Infants University
Hospital said yesterday that the hospital would not be making any further comment while the review was under way.
She said it was expected that the review would be completed within a number of weeks. Following the incident, and a similar scenario occurring at the Rotunda Hospital, the HSE published a document on Covid19 vaccination of frontline healthcare workers. It said there should be a standby list of healthcare workers available to avoid any waste of vaccines.
The HSE document, which was approved by Chief Clinical Officer Dr Colm Henry, outlined that ‘every effort should be made’ to ensure vaccines are given to frontline healthcare workers ‘rather than given primarily to people later in the sequence who work in the institution that hosts the vaccination centre’.
Hospitals were advised that they should have a list of 120 frontline workers on standby.
David Cullinane, Sinn Féin spokesman on health, said: ‘This is a damning report. To ignore medical students was totally unacceptable.’
‘This is a damning report’