REACTION:A SEPARATE review by the Health Service Executive to establish if radiology backlogs were a problem at other hospitals across the State will be published within a few weeks, the executive's director of quality and clinical care said yesterday.
Dr Barry White said the national review had been a massive exercise and involved reviewing “over seven million X-ray requests across the country”.
Backlogs are known to have been found in some hospitals, but these are now understood to have been cleared.
Dr White said the HSE accepted all the recommendations of the Hayes report. “There is a serious obligation here to ensure . . . the recommendations made are fully implemented and we’re fully committed to doing that,” he said.
Minister for Health Mary Harney said Dr Hayes’s report had very clearly identified serious concerns about the robustness of Tallaght hospital’s management and governance structures. “He refers to problems to do with the management structure, culture and style; the inadequacy of reporting systems; the lack of clear lines of responsibility; inadequate risk management; lack of written protocols and procedures; communications within the hospital and with the main stakeholders; poorly developed relationships with GPs in the area and a failure of governance which were inconsistent with a patient-centred approach.
“It is obvious from the report that the incident which triggered this examination by Dr Hayes was not a once-off episode and that there have been ongoing problems in the hospital,” she said.
“Work has already commenced to address some of these issues on a sustained basis,” she added.
She said she would be meeting with the hospital and the HSE to establish how the recommendations of the report can be implemented as soon as possible.
In a statement, Tallaght hospital said it wanted to reiterate its regret that two patients had suffered a delayed diagnosis.
It also welcomed the report’s recommendations, pointing out that many of its findings in relation to governance had been raised by PricewaterhouseCoopers in an earlier report commissioned by the hospital. It now has a new board structure in place.
“The hospital is working closely with the Health Information and Quality Authority, the HSE, local GPs and others to ensure that it delivers an increasingly effective service that responds to patients’ needs,” it said.
Richie O’Reilly of the Tallaght Hospital Action Group said what stood out in the report was the understaffing of the hospital.
Fine Gael’s health spokesman Dr James Reilly said it was deeply worrying that two additional consultant radiologist posts at the hospital, the need for which has been clearly identified, remain unfilled. “This is risking a recurrence of this problem and putting patients at risk,” he said.
The posts were approved in February and advertised in September.
Sinn Féin’s health spokesman Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin called for the report’s full implementation. However, he said the threatened €1 billion cuts in the health budget will lead to similar problems.
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) said the report highlighted the consequences of demand for services exceeding supply. “Given the forthcoming budget cuts and the growing problem of recruiting sufficient numbers of competent non-consultant hospital doctors, the IHCA is growing increasingly concerned at the capacity of our hospital system from next January”.