FEARS ABOUT SCAN UNIT RAISED IN 2011
CALLS FOR TOTAL OVERHAUL OF HOW UHK’S SCANNING UNIT IS MANAGED
SERIOUS concerns about staffing levels and the quality of work being carried out at the Radiology Department at University Hospital Kerry were raised in the Dáil six years ago.
In September 2011, Kerry Sinn Féin TD Martin Ferris quizzed then Health Minister Dr James Reilly on the case of an individual whose chest x-ray was allegedly misread resulting in an eight month delay before the patient was eventually diagnosed with cancer.
Deputy Ferris asked Minister Reilly to make a statement and launch an investigation into the 2009 case but the Minister did not reply to the questions and referred them to the HSE.
The Kerryman has contacted Deputy Ferris’ office to see if a reply from the HSE was issued and, if so, what it contained.
Three months earlier Kerry Fine Gael Deputy Brendan Griffin had also raised concerns about the UHK Radiology Department with Minister Reilly.
Deputy Griffin asked “what efforts were being made to alleviate the impending crisis in radiologist staffing” at the hospital which was then known as Kerry General Hospital.
Again Minister Reilly did not reply and referred the matter to the HSE.
In the wake of this week’s revelations, several politicians are now calling for a root and branch review of how the Radiology Department is staffed and run.
Fine Gael Cllr Aoife Thronton took issue with the HSE’s insistence that the current crisis has nothing to do with staffing or resources and is solely “an issue of competency”.
“I am not convinced it is about competence. I am not satisfied it’s competency, that it is not workload,” she said.
“The number of scans that were examined by a single radiologist raises serious questions. I would have concerns that a radiologist is being made a scapegoat and their life potentially ruined to paper over serious ongoing resource issues at the Department,” said Cllr Thornton.
Deputy Michael Healy-Rae also raised concerns about the volume of scans dealt with by the locum at the heart of the controversy.
“It’s very worrying. This person was dealing with an astronomical number of scans and if you do the sums the amount of time given being to each one must have been miniscule, considering the potential enormity of what they were looking at. It seems like an enormous amount of work for one person,” said Deputy Healy-Rae.
The HSE has also come in for severe criticism over its policy based decision to withhold information on the scandal from the public.
Since the story broke over the weekend, the HSE has issued contradictory information on how many people are affected.
On Monday morning, senior management from UHK and the HSE’s South/South West Hospital Group told reporters at a press briefing that three serious cancer cases had been misdiagnosed.
Less than an hour later at a meeting with local elected representatives – following intense questioning from Sinn Féin Cllr Toireasa Ferris – the same HSE panel admitted there were actually seven cases, one of which involves a patient who apparently now has an inoperable tumour.