Hospital apologises over results mix-up in Moriarty case

Karl Henry: blood test results were not those of his late wife

A DUBLIN hospital which treated the late Ann Moriarty has apologised for inadvertently giving out another patient's blood test results to her family.

Karl Henry, the husband of Ms Moriarty, who died within months of being twice told she did not have breast cancer following chest X-rays at Ennis General Hospital, said yesterday he found the other named patient's test results while going through his late wife's medical records, released to him under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act by St James's Hospital.

Ms Moriarty had been treated at the hospital for breast cancer in 2005 and again in 2007. She died in April.

St James's claimed the test results were handed out in error, not with the FOI request, but to Ms Moriarty's family with other data when she was discharged from the hospital in August 2007. It said this correlated with the date on the other patient's blood test results.

"St James's Hospital can confirm that unfortunately, due to human error, a copy of another patient's routine blood test result was inadvertently included in the information provided," it said in a statement. "St James's Hospital will be contacting the other patient's family to explain what happened and will be offering its apologies for this human error."

However, Mr Henry insists the test results were in the middle of a file released under FOI to him last November, and he only discovered them in recent days when going through the file in detail.

He said he was shocked at the error, coming after he had waited months for the hospital to release a mammogram carried out on his late wife in April 2007, only for the hospital then to admit it was missing.

He was upset that the mammogram could not be found to be reviewed, as the hospital reported the results of it as normal at the time, and he wondered if this could be a correct report, given that his wife was found to be terminally ill four months later.

A spokesman said the hospital had rechecked Ms Moriarty's file and the other patient's blood test results were not on it. It was a copy of this file that had been released under FOI, he insisted.

The hospital previously apologised to Mr Henry for not being able to locate the mammogram.

© 2008 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times