Tragedy of Vicky Phelan is not an aberration, it’s part of a pattern
YESTERDAY, outgoing head of the HSE Tony O’Brien assured the public that the scandal that has engulfed the cervical-screening programme would “not happen again”. Who is he kidding?
Vicky Phelan had to take on the might of the State in a High Court battle to get the truth. She was not informed of a misdiagnosed 2011 smear test until 2017, despite the fact CervicalCheck had been aware of the error since it conducted an audit in 2014.
Following that audit, it took two years for Ms Phelan’s clinician to be informed of the error and a further year of unseemly wrangling between her clinician and CervicalCheck about who bore the responsibility of delivering the bad news before she was eventually told.
But she is not alone. There are another 208 women out there who were similarly affected by this scandal, 17 of whom have now died.
Incredibly, despite the former head of CervicalCheck Gráinne Flannelly stating in a car-crash interview on ‘Morning Ireland’ on Friday that “her sense” was that all of these women had been informed, it has now transpired the vast majority were not.
In total, 162 women – nearly 78pc – were not told. They were left completely in the dark about the fact their cancer should have been detected earlier.
These are women who should have had access to earlier intervention. We do not know yet how serious the implications were for each of them.
What we do know is that in 175 of the 208 cases, there would have been a “different clinical escalation of care”. These women would have had more tests, more reviews, and more aggressive treatment.
The State, via CervicalCheck and the HSE, didn’t think these women deserved to know this. They didn’t feel these women were entitled to their own medical information.
That so many women were not informed indicates that this was no accident. It was policy.
Rather than face uncomfortable questions and potential legal action, the State preferred to censor the information that was delivered to these patients.
The scale of this scandal is breathtaking. And none of us would ever have known about it were it not for the decision of one courageous woman, while battling terminal cancer, to risk her home, her savings, and her health by launching High Court proceedings – and refusing to be bound by a confidentiality clause when a settlement was first mooted.
But while this controversy is shocking it should not be surprising.
There has been a long litany of health scandals in this country in which the State has circled the wagons and attempted to bully, cajole and intimidate patients who have experienced negligent care when they have started to ask questions.
The most infamous example is the hepatitis C debacle and the despicable manner in which the State treated Brigid McCole (right), a 54-year-old mother of 12 who was threatened with financial ruin for pursuing a case even as she was dying.
In September 1996, solicitors for the Blood Transfusion Service wrote to Ms McCole and offered to admit liability, settle her case and apologise for negligence. However, they warned that if she refused to accept their offer they would seek “all additional costs thereby incurred”.
What caused a political furore at the time was not just the fact that 1,600 people, including Ms McCole, had been infected but that the then Health Minister Michael Noonan had sight of this letter before it was sent out.
Implicitly, he had stood over the State adopting the most aggressive possible legal strategy; the legal threats came with a ministerial imprimatur.
Ms McCole died from liver failure just a month after this letter was sent in October 1996, hours after her lawyers eventually settled her case for IR£175,000 – by which point, public outrage over her disgusting treatment necessitated the creation of a tribunal of inquiry.
But, the story doesn’t end there. The tragedy that engulfed the McCole family claimed another victim. Ms McCole’s husband Brianie died four years later in August 2000, having taken his own life.
A heart-breaking report in this newspaper, from his funeral, stated Mr McCole had “never recovered from her cruel death”.
“He had watched his wife waste away as the ravages of hepatitis C enveloped her. He stood by her as she fought to expose the truth about the contamination and the State’s brutality in covering it up.
“In the end, the simple life of Brianie and Brigid McCole was no match for the duplicity of those who ruined their lives and the lives of their children,” it said.
While these controversies create headlines for weeks or even months, they eventually fade from public consciousness.
However, families don’t have the luxury of forgetting. They must live with the consequences of these failures for the rest of their lives.
There have been other scandals in the health service throughout the years, too numerous to mention here.
In all of them there is one common feature – a pre-eminent desire by the State to bury bad news, to keep patients in the dark and to try to mitigate the risk of legal action.
At the heart of this is a failure of accountability and a lack of responsibility.
The head of CervicalCheck, Dr Flannelly, has now stepped down. But who else in a position of authority knew what was going on? Why didn’t anyone else intervene and do something? Where does the buck stop?
SERIOUS questions were raised yesterday by Dr David Gibbons, the former head of the quality assurance committee of the national cervical screening programme, who claimed he had warned Mr O’Brien about deficits in the US system of testing smear tests.
These concerns were rebuffed by Mr O’Brien yesterday, who said the system was riven with delay before testing was outsourced to America. Clearly, this is an issue that will need to be addressed by any inquiry.
But more so, how can any inquiry or any assurance by Mr O’Brien – or indeed Health Minister Simon Harris – that this fiasco will not be repeated be believed?
The manner in which the State conducted itself throughout this scandal was not an aberration – but the norm.
If there is to be real reform it means people need to be held accountable for failures, mistakes need to be acknowledged, and patients and their families need to be treated with respect and dignity.
Not pursued through the courts and bullied into silence.
The fact that so many women were not informed indicates that this was no accident. It was policy