Postmortem services are being run on a “wing and prayer”, with pathologists walking away from the service, the incoming president of the Coroners Society of Ireland has said.
Dr Denis McCauley said there were huge discrepancies around the country in the length of time it took for postmortems to be held, with delays adding to the grief experienced by families.
McCauley told Newstalk’s Claire Byrne Show on Wednesday the €300 fee paid to pathologists has not increased in 20 years.
He said the situation was complicated by the fact the service was operated by three different bodies – the Health Service Executive (HSE), the Department of Justice and local authorities.
READ MORE
“It is a perfect storm for procrastination,” he said.
McCauley explained that 95 per cent of postmortems in Ireland were carried out in HSE buildings by HSE consultants.
“Paradoxically, they’re also paid by the local authorities, but everything is directed from the Department of Justice. Now, the problem is that the pathologists have decided that they’re too busy,” he said.
The service is also divided into three: the adult service; the children’s service, for children over three months; and the perinatal service.
“Each of those are under great pressure,” said McCauley. “I was expecting the children’s service to be the first to give problems, but it is the adult service that is giving problems. We’ve been warning the Government about this for the last 15 years,” he said.
“They’ve really done nothing about it. They will give stock answers saying, ‘oh, there’s a postmortem advisory group that’s been up and running for six or seven, for five years’, and it’s really not working.”
McCauley said only two consultants in the country were carrying out postmortems on children.
“When one of those retires, I don’t think we’ll have a service,” he said.
Six-thousand postmortems are carried out each year in Ireland by pathologists all over the country.
McCauley said that, increasingly, younger pathologists were saying they were too busy to perform postmortems and they found the court system “too adversarial”.
“When somebody dies in Donegal today, they will have a postmortem done tomorrow morning. The body will be released at lunchtime. If it’s in Dublin or some other areas or Waterford, it may be done once a week, so that family is going to have to wait a week,” he said.
“When you have the situation where children are being moved needlessly from Dublin to Cork to have the postmortem done, that’s not appropriate.”
McCauley said the service currently costs €2 million a year but should be about €10m. “I’m saying, this is Government work. Come on, stop telling me what you can’t do. Just sort it out,” he said.
