THE INQUIRY team investigating the failure to process thousands of GP referral letters and the non-reporting of nearly 58,000 X-rays at Tallaght hospital began its review yesterday with a fact-finding visit to the hospital.
Chairman of the team, former independent senator and former Northern Ireland ombudsman Dr Maurice Hayes, said that while the group had been established by the HSE, its work would be independent.
He told a press briefing in Dublin that he had been assured the group would have full access to the hospital’s files, that it could ask whatever questions it wished and reach whatever conclusions it wanted to. Dr Hayes pointed out that while it would not be a sworn inquiry with powers to compel witnesses, he had been assured of total co-operation by the hospital’s chief executive, Prof Kevin Conlon, and chairman Lyndon MacCann.
Further, he stressed it would not be a disciplinary inquiry “but we will report what we see . . . and it will be a matter for the bodies concerned, and perhaps even professional bodies concerned, to see whether there should be action taken”.
The aim of the inquiry, Dr Hayes said, was to find out what went wrong and why and to see if the problems at the hospital arose from “systems failure or lack of protocols or not keeping to protocols that were there or lack of resources or failure to use the resources that were there to the best effect” or communication and governance issues.
They will look to see if what happened was a result of human error, negligence or systems failures. The objective was to restore public confidence in the hospital, he added, and apply any lessons learned across the healthcare system. Dr Hayes will meet the Tallaght Hospital Action Group later this week and he said he will have an “open door” to hearing representations from anyone who wished to comment.
He hopes to be able to report back to the HSE in about three months with his findings, but if in the course of the review any immediate concerns for patient safety are identified, these will be immediately communicated to the hospital, the HSE, and the Health Information and Quality Authority.
The inquiry team’s report will also be published. The terms of reference for the inquiry were drawn up by the HSE following meetings with Dr Hayes and were approved by the inquiry team at its first meeting yesterday.
They require the team to identify and analyse the circumstances and the factors “clinical, managerial and systematic” that led to the accumulation of a backlog of 57,921 unreported X-rays at the hospital between 2005 and 2009.
They also require the team to examine the hospital’s response to the backlog when it was identified.
Similarly, they require the inquiry team to analyse the hospital’s management and processing of GP referral letters.
The hospital has said there was a backlog of 3,498 unprocessed letters in the hospital last October. Some of them dated back to 2002.
The inquiry team will also include Patricia Gordon, former chief executive of Belfast’s Mater hospital; GP nominee Dr Declan Murphy; Brian O’Mahony of the Irish Haemophilia Society representing patients; consultant radiologist Dr Risteárd Ó Laoide, dean of the faculty of radiology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; and Dr Paul Kavanagh, a consultant in public health medicine with the HSE.
