Two patients who attended Galway's University College Hospital had their diagnosis of prostate cancer delayed by two years as a result of errors made by another locum consultant pathologist, a new report has found.
The report, which has been published by the Health Service Executive today following its review of the work of a third pathologist who worked at the hospital for six weeks in 2004, states that the patients had their diagnosis delayed until 2006 due to reporting errors made by the locum.
However it says the delayed diagnosis does not appear to have had any long term adverse impact on the patients. This may be because cancer of the prostate often progresses very slowly.
The pathologist was responsible for reporting on 982 specimens ranging from cervical smears and breast tissue to bowel and thyroid gland samples while he worked at the hospital. Some 58 errors were found in his work when these specimens were reviewed in recent months.
The report says while this was an unacceptable number of errors just three patients were impacted upon. These included the two men whose prostate cancer diagnosis was delayed and a third patient who underwent an operation to remove a wider area of skin which the review found was unnecessary.
The pathologist left Ireland in 2004 and it was only after he was suspended from the medical register by the General Medical Council in the UK in September 2007 that it was decided to review the work he had done in Galway.
Bridget Howley, general manager of Galway University Hospital, said all the patients involved in the review had been sent a copy of the report.
"We are very conscious of the distress caused by the problems outlined in this report and would like to apologise again to those patients and their families," she said.
She added that since 2004 a more robust procedure for recruiting locum consultant pathologists and for checking their references has been put in place at the hospital.
The HSE revealed it was reviewing the work of this third pathologist last July after a report into the work of two other pathologists who were employed at the Galway hospital was published by the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa).
The other two included Dr Antoine Geagea, who worked at the hospital from September 2006 to March 2007. The Hiqa investigation found he made a significant number of diagnostic errors while working at the hospital which resulted in a delayed diagnosis or delayed treatment for 12 patients.
The second pathologist who worked at Galway University Hospital whose work was reviewed in that Hiqa report was found to have made an error in reading a biopsy in September 2005 which contributed to an 18-month delay in the diagnosis of a 51-year-old Tipperary woman with breast cancer.
Meanwhile the latest report from the HSE also states that a sample of the work of 19 other consultant pathologists, some full time and some of them locums, at Galway University Hospital has also been conducted as a result of concerns raised by callers to its helpline since 2007.
In all 268 specimens from 130 patients have been looked at as part of this review, which found errors made by two other consultants in 2003 and 2005 resulted in one man not having his prostate cancer diagnosed for five years.
He was diagnosed in 2008 and the delayed diagnosis appears to have had little or no impact on his health, the report says.
No other errors were found in the work of these two other consultants.