Doctor admits failings over treatment of cancer patient

A GP has admitted to poor professional performance over his treatment of a patient who died from thyroid cancer.

Dr Pawel Kaminski accepted three allegations in relation to the treatment of Christine Monahan over five visits to his surgery at the Ballyowen Lane Medical Centre in Lucan, Dublin, at a hearing of the Irish Medical Council’s fitness-to-practise committee yesterday.

The committee heard Ms Monahan, 52, of Wood Avens, Clondalkin, Dublin, had attended his clinic with a painful throat in June 2015 and was ultimately diagnosed with anaplastic thyroid cancer and died on October 20, 2015. Dr Kaminski accepted he failed to arrange for the patient to be referred for an ultrasound or other appropriate radiological investigation, as well as failing to keep an adequate medical record for followup action when she visited his surgery on June 11, 2015.

Dr Kaminski also accepted he had failed to refer her to an endocrinologist or prescribe appropriate medications on four subsequent visits to his surgery over the following eight weeks, after he had diagnosed her with an overactive thyroid.

He further acknowledged that his referral letter to the radiology department at St James’s Hospital on August 6, 2015 had failed to provide adequate information about the patient’s condition to ensure the case was treated as urgent.

Dr Kaminski, who comes from Poland and qualified as a doctor in 1993, has been working as a GP in Ireland since 2012. He now works in a practice in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford. In a statement, Janice Monahan, the patient’s daughter, said her family had never been told that their mother could have cancer. She said her father, John, was ‘completely lost’ since her mother’s death.

As is customary, the committee did not disclose the recommended sanctions it has proposed to the Irish Medical Council.