All deaths which occurred at the Leas Cross nursing home in north Dublin or which occurred immediately after patients were transferred to hospital from the home over the past four years are to be the subject of an independent review.
The review of deaths at the private nursing home in Swords has been confirmed by Minister of State at the Department of Health Seán Power.
The review begins immediately and will be conducted by an as yet unnamed professor in geriatric medicine. He will review deaths going back to 2001.
A letter written by a consultant psychiatrist to the Health Service Executive (HSE) northern area in January last year stated that seven public patients transferred to Leas Cross from St Ita's hospital in Portrane had died within three to four months, but did not contain any comment about the deaths.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny maintained in the Dáil last month that a separate report on the care provided to a 60-year-old man with Down syndrome who died two weeks after being admitted to Leas Cross had highlighted "unusually high mortality rates". The report by Martin Hynes, former head of the blood bank, has not yet been published.
Mr Power told the Fine Gael Deputy Fergus O'Dowd, in reply to a parliamentary question, that the HSE had informed the Department of Health that the HSE northern area had made arrangements to review all deaths both of residents at Leas Cross and of residents who died on immediate transfer to acute hospitals.He said this will involve a review of the medical/nursing files of patients in the first instance.
The review comes in the wake of weeks of controversy about standards of care at the home.
Two weeks ago the HSE northern area said the home "will not be or is not" in compliance with basic care regulations and that it planned on removing public patients from the home and advising private patients to also move.
This advice followed a three-week assessment by experts brought in by the HSE. They were alarmed over the level of nursing care for dependent residents, inadequate disease control measures and signs of sores on a significant number of patients.
A spokesman for the HSE northern area said yesterday that some patients had now moved out of the home and relocations were "progressing satisfactorily". A number of patients are still in the home and are happy there.
The owner of the home, John Aherne, offered the HSE a free lease on the home for six months as an alternative to removing patients from it. Asked yesterday if it would take up the offer, the HSE northern area said the offer had been made in a media statement, but Mr Aherne had made no formal offer to the HSE.
Mr O'Dowd described the review of all deaths since 2001 as a significant step in establishing what went on inside the home.
He called on Minister for Health Mary Harney to explain why seven nursing homes in the north Dublin area had been deemed unsuitable for Leas Cross residents who were being rehoused. "If these other nursing homes are considered unsuitable for Leas Cross residents then they are equally unsuitable for existing residents," he said.
The HSE northern area said the seven homes had been asked to make improvements and the concerns about them were not on the same scale as Leas Cross.