Whistleblower in ‘Grace’ case says people are still afraid to speak up
THE whistleblower at the centre of the case involving the mistreatment of a profoundly intellectually disabled woman known as ‘Grace’ says the Kerry CAMHS case shows nothing has changed in the HSE.
Iain Smith told the Irish Mail on Sunday this weekend: ‘Nothing has changed within the HSE since I blew the whistle to Leo Varadkar seven years ago. You can see that with the [South] Kerry CAMHS and the Naas anaesthetist scandals. People are still afraid to speak out.
‘When a conscientious new worker comes in from the outside and tries to sort out the problems, they are sidelined and forced out, as happened to me. When I reviewed our services in 2013, the HSE sent my report straight to their senior civil liability solicitor.
‘The Irish health services prioritise legal defence. From the contaminated blood to the cervical smear test scandals, it’s always the same. It’s a legacy attitude that has no place in a modern health care system.’
Mr Smith, a social worker, blew the whistle on how ‘Grace’ was left with a foster family for 13
The Irish health service prioritises legal defence’
years, while other foster children were removed from the same family because of allegations of sexual abuse and evidence of physical abuse and neglect.
It comes as a review into allegations that children attending mental health services in south Kerry received inappropriate medication found that the junior doctor looking after them was prescribing out of hours by phone.
He was also giving those in care his mobile number and contacting patients on social media.
Dr David Kromer, who graduated in the Czech Republic, was also moonlighting in the beauty industry injecting Botox in beauty salons in different counties.
Details of these out-of-hours activities are contained in this week’s shocking report by the UK-based consultant, Dr Sean Maskey.
At one point, in September 2019, a colleague of Dr Kromer believed he was ‘almost out of control’. Yet the colleague, who had been tasked with supervising Dr Kromer from the outset, and other superiors, failed to act by raising concerns with the HSE nationally or with the Medical Council.
Instead a whistleblower who has now resigned from the HSE, Dr Ankur Sharma, was largely responsible for bringing the scandal to light.
The report, now being examined by gardaí, the Medical Council and other State agencies, also reveals how Dr Kromer was ‘running a private treatment service from his home, sometimes seeing people privately up to midnight’.
Dr Kromer did not participate in the Maskey Report but has defended his treatment decisions and indicated this week that he expects to be the subject of a Medical Council inquiry.
The report, which has shocked parents, patient’ representatives, politicians and regulators, assumes that Dr Kromer ‘intended to help, not harm’.
But instead his practices – and the failures of HSE supervisors and managers – resulted in hundreds of children receiving ‘risky’ treatment. In all, 46 of those children suffered significant harm, something that the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, a former health minister, has called ‘shocking, very serious and unacceptable’.
Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, also a former health minister who cut mental health funding during his tenure, has indicated that ‘compensation will be necessary’.
This week, the Government moved to detach repeated mental health budget cuts from blame, saying the HSE’s five-year failure to hire a consultant to supervise Dr Kromer was not a ‘resource issue’.
But the Maskey Report throws considerable light on the impact of years of budget cuts on mental health services.
One example of this is that the South Kerry CAMHS was a paperbased operation involving ‘card files retained with metal spring clips’. Once these patient files became full, their ‘integrity failed’ and the contents fell out easily, potentially becoming jumbled or lost.
In addition, these paper patient files, stored in an open filing room without a lock, were often removed by clinicians without any record of their removal. Consequently many patient files were lost, resulting in patients not being followed up – a breach of data protection laws and of proper clinical guidelines.
This and the inability of the entire service to share a diary system meant administration staff did not know who was coming in for appointments and ‘frequently’ had to ‘hunt through the building for case files that are needed urgently’.