THE HUSBAND of a woman who died of breast cancer within months of being wrongly told that X-rays on her at Ennis General Hospital were normal said last night he was hopeful an independent inquiry into her care would now be established following a meeting with the Minister for Health Mary Harney.
Karl Henry met Ms Harney for 1½ hours at Leinster House. He outlined his concerns that if X-rays on his late wife, Ann Moriarty (53), were misread on more than one occasion, and if his wife’s abnormal blood tests were filed away without being acted on at Ennis hospital last year, then other patients may also have been put at risk.
He urged her to establish an independent inquiry into how these failures occurred, and into how a mammogram, reported as normal, on his wife in April 2007 at Dublin’s St James’s Hospital went missing and cannot now be reviewed.
Two internal reviews have already been carried out by the HSE at Ennis hospital, while a multi-disciplinary team at Galway’s University College Hospital also reviewed Ms Moriarty’s case.
The multi-disciplinary team referred to “systemic failures” at Ennis and its failure to refer her to a specialist cancer centre given she had a history of breast cancer. She had been treated for breast cancer at St James’s Hospital in 2005, but was in remission when she attended Ennis hospital in 2007 after feeling unwell.
The HSE has said, on the advice of the faculty of radiology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, that there is no need for a wider review of the reading of X-rays at Ennis, something with which Mr Henry disagrees.
Mr Henry said he had not received a commitment from Ms Harney that an independent inquiry would be established but he was hopeful his views would be taken on board. “I believe that she now has a very full picture of the entire sequence of events which extends really far beyond the case of my late wife . . . We would be particularly hopeful of a positive outcome.”
He also hopes to air his concerns to the independent Health Information and Quality Authority at a meeting tomorrow
A spokesman for Ms Harney said last night that the meeting with Mr Henry was positive. His concerns were discussed, and it was now a matter for the authority to decide if further inquiry was appropriate.